Essay #2: Arnold Spirit’s Identity

Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian is a coming-of-age

story about Junior, a fourteen-year-old boy who is the first in his family to leave their

reservation. The people on the rez have very negative feelings about anyone who leaves because

they think that it means that person wants to become white and is going to leave them all behind

forever. Junior just wants a better life for himself; he wants to maintain his friendships and

family ties on the rez and struggles with how to do so when his peers only want to reject him. It

is evident that Junior spent most of his life shaping his identity around how others viewed him,

and only after leaving the rez and attending a white high school was he able to discover how he

wants to identify himself.

Junior spends the first chapter of the book introducing himself as being defined by his

defects. The first thing the audience learns about Junior is that he was born with brain issues and

is consequently disabled. He even calls himself a retard when he explains why he gets beat up so

frequently (Alexie, 4). This shows how unquestionably he believes everything that people say to

and about him and how it negatively impacts his self-esteem even if he is able to talk about it

humorously. As the novel progresses and Junior transfers to the white school off of the

reservation, his self-image slowly begins to change because a whole new crowd of people is

seeing him and forming their opinions of him. The white kids at Reardan have had minimal

exposure to Indians before Junior arrives at their school, so he expects them to feel the same way

about him that the other Indians do. Based on his childhood of peer abuse, he enters their world

ready to defend himself as best he knows how. When the kids there do not reject him but instead

show him a basic level of respect, he is shocked. He was able to fit into their world and act like

one of them, but he is even less able to fit in at home due to this new persona. Junior feels “half
Indian in one place and half white in the other” and as though he is “always a stranger” because

he is trying to figure out his new identity as someone who spends half their time on the rez and

half their time off (118). Unsure of what he wants or who he is, he continues to identify himself

how he is seen by others. The white kids do not treat him like a poor, dirty Indian, but like one of

them, and the Indians now treat him even worse because of his new ‘white-ness.’

As Junior spends more time at Reardan and forms genuine friendships with the kids

there, his self-image begins to change based entirely on their feelings about him, and he is able to

move past the awful things that his fellow Indians say about him. Because the kids at Reardan

assumed Junior was rich, he did not do anything to inform them otherwise, because he liked

being able to act that way with them and fit in better (Alexie, 119). Junior likes the way his new

peers treat him as he has never experienced it before, so he worries that if they find anything out

about his life then that might change. Having healthy friendships for the first time in his life and

being so accepted for who he is causes his attitude about himself to change to match their

perception, but at the same time he is still lying. At the winter formal, Junior has to wear his

dad’s old suit because he does not have any money to rent one, but instead of realizing that he is

poor, everybody loves it. His friend and romantic interest Penelope gives him lots of

compliments which immensely boosted his self-esteem in the moment, he says, “Penelope

thought I was beautiful and so I felt beautiful,” and talks about being “drunk with sudden

power,” (122). One person’s approval was all it took for Junior to become as happy as the

audience has ever seen him and to truly love himself and his life. As part of the cycle, when

Junior loved himself, he showed it outwardly, and so people loved him too. Even though the

Indians at home were showing him harsh judgment for attending Reardan, it was exactly what he

needed for his identity to mature beyond the hatred that he felt growing up.
 After the winter formal, Junior is terrified of his friends finding out that he is poor, but

their reaction is not what he expected it would be at all. They do not judge him or belittle him,

Penelope shows distress because she feels bad, and his friend Roger drives him 22 miles home in

the middle of the night (Alexie, 129). At this time, Junior realizes that there is nothing wrong

with being poor, and that he does not need to hide it from the kids at Reardan. They respect him

and they are willing to take care of him, as Roger drives him home many more times after that.

This is somewhat mind-blowing to Junior because he had braced himself for an impact that did

not come. He was beginning to accept his situation and appreciated how kind Penelope was to

him about it. By the end of the school year and after going through multiple community tragedies

including the death of his only sibling, the way Junior identifies himself has almost nothing in

common with how he did in the first chapter. He positively embraces the “lonely Indian boy”

stereotype that has been pushed upon him and realizes that he is crazy brave and belongs to

countless different groups such as basketball players and bookworms. He also calls himself a

Spokane Indian, proudly, for the first time (217). He becomes overwhelmed with ways he can

identify himself and overwhelmed with self-acceptance. It is here that he understands he is going

to be okay. Unsure of what the future holds, he is sure of who he is, and he is ready to take it on.

Junior’s childhood was shaped by being perpetually bullied and belittled by his

community on the Spokane reservation. He was never given a chance to find himself because he

just saw himself the way others saw him, which caused him to have low self-esteem. After

making the terrifying transition to Reardan, the white high school off the rez, Junior’s identity

starts changing, but for a while he is unsure that he belongs anywhere at all. The Indians reject

him even more than before because he left, and the white kids do not know the full truth about

his life. When he gains popularity and the attention of his new peers his confidence begins to
grow and eventually he is able to apply it in his life on the rez as well and redefine himself

completely. Junior identified himself unquestionably based on how others perceived him for his

whole life until he was put into a new situation at Reardan, and then he was able to grow up and

discover who he truly was and wanted to be for the first time.