...According to the 2010 U.S. census, about 22% of our country’s 5.2 million Native Americans live on tribal lands along with reservations. The main character in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is about a Native American who lives on a reservation and learns to follow his own path. The topics in this essay are Indian reservations, Indian schools and, Indians today. Some Indians on reservations are very poor, for example, “I picked up the other boot and dug in side. Man, that thing smelled like booze and fear and failure. I found a wrinkled and damp five dollar bill. “Merry Christmas,” the dad said.” This quote is on page 153. This quote made a point because, junior’s dad is an acholic and because the dad saved...
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...Richele Tucker Stacie Sather English 305 15 November 2013 The novel, The Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexi is about a young American Indian boy who decides to leave the reservation to better his life. He starts out finding himself through this change in his life and continues to grow and change into the young man he wants to become. At the beginning of the novel he seems frustrated because he is told he must do as the others on the reservation and he seems to feel mistreated when he does exactly like the youth on the reservation. By the end of the story he seems to change his outlook and goes through a realization of reality and he seems to feel more hopeful that he isn’t the only one who isn’t perfect in this crazy and vast world. When he is in school upon the res he feels like there no way to get very far. He states that all the hope is with the white people. So he decided to change school after getting in trouble in the reservation math class for throwing a 30 year old math text book at the teacher. The teacher later talks to junior and gives him hope to see he can do better and the teacher believes he will but he needs to take advantage of all the resources her can. In that he finds himself looking into going to Reardon junior high school. Reardon is an all-white junior high which junior views as perfect. Though upon entering this school he comes to realize that’s not all true. He notices that the problems found on the reservation...
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...Part-Time Indian: a Journey of Hope “There is another world, but it is in this one” (W.B Yeats), this is how Sherman Alexie managed to begin the journey of his eye-opening novel, The Absolutely True Dairy of Part-time Indian. It is a magnificent story of overcoming the obstacles of being an Indian teenager while stepping outside of the reservation world and striving for better opportunities in the world. Junior, who carries the Native American blood in his roots, gives an insight into Native American culture, encompassing all of its sacred and astonishing details. Through Junior’s experience and between the storylines, various aspects of the Spokane Indians community are revealed, such as poverty, alcoholism, and kinship that make the novel stand as an unique Indian literature piece....
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...Victor was ridiculed and excluded by the other boys in his school for kissing a little white girl. He was also part of the basketball team, where even though he was uncomfortable with others calling his team the Indians, he remained and played. He was able to find resilience though these hard times by playing basketball for his school and not falling to negative circumstances, unlike his classmate Wally Jim who took his own life. Victor finally graduated from high school as the class valedictorian. He slowly watched as each of his classmates from the small farm school descended into alcoholism and wasted their life...
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...Notably Sherman Alexie was an intelligent and extraordinary filmmaker, poet, performer, and novelist. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit. Then, he attended Washington State University in Pullman and received his BA in American Studies. Alexie childhood years were very strenuous for him. Being born with a condition called hydrocephalic caused him to suffer from random seizures and bed wetting. He was also dealing with the pain that his father caused by leaving him and his mother at a young age without any explanation of his actions, which caused Alexie to become exceedingly hostile and bitter towards his father. Through every piece of work that he has written, we learn more about Alexie's childhood. Alexie's poems...
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...they forget about the people around them and treat them as if they are not of the same species. The same idea is shared by the author Sherman Alexie in his essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”. The essay reflects upon the life of an Indian boy living in a reservation in today’s America. His main argument highlights how determination is a useful weapon when it comes to facing segregation in a society, and offers insight of how he is trying to save the children currently living on these reservation by getting them to open up to literacy and adaptation. Alexie was made a victim of racism. He was in an environment where the society’s restrictions allowed no one to go further in life. Everyone was required to follow the same old tradition and be under certain standards. Most followed these beliefs, but Alexie, he was different. He always loved reading and hoped to become a pediatrician. He was considered an oddity by his own people for being smart. He never liked the negative influences of the Indians and therefore never followed them. For this he always got in a brawl with his classmates, “They wanted me to stay quite when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid” (Alexie 17). Alexie views this as an opportunity to show the outside world how an Indian society works. How...
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...Superman and Me” which is written by Sherman Alexie several days before. I noticed this essay because of its heading which is interesting. In this article, Alexie aims to tell millennials, especially those from India that the way he acquired literacy and how he succeeded in a non-Indian World despite the negative expectations of Indian people in US society. Alexie starts this article with a short story about the book which encourages him to read. He says: “We were poor by most standard …… I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph” (12). Alexie establishes pathos by describing the poverty in his childhood and the happiness when he understood the paragraph. Readers could get into his story and they doubt the relationship between those books and his brilliant literacy. He also establishes pathos with some sentences like “As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians. I refused to fail” (12). These words are easy to affect the audience’s emotional response. So it will be easier for Alexie to persuade millennials to read books and benefit from books. Then Alexie tells that he read and learned a lot from books after that. According to his own experience, Alexie says that millennials should read books as much as they can. Also, he states that “We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid”...
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...and developing country, Mexico. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian and The Devil’s Highway, they both facing the poverty issue. Sherman Alexie is telling us about the Indian American living in a hard life and Luis Alberto Urrea is telling us about the poor Mexican people migrating to United States for gaining wealth. Both of the two stories meets the same problem which is poverty forcing them to make change. The path to success are tough and hard, both of them have to discard something for the cost. However, their ending are not the same. Sherman Alexie is telling us the real life of Indian American who still lives in the Indian reservation. For those people, their poverty are generational and inheritance. “Seriously, I know my mother and father had their dreams when they were kids. They dreamed about being something other than poor, but they never got the chance to be anything because nobody paid attention to their dreams” (Sherman Alexie 12). As Arnold talks about his parents living in poor, he is helpless and feeling despairing because he knew that the poverty has been an issue for the Indian American for many generations. To think about more deeply, another view of what Arnold says is, he still believe that Indian people are equal to other ones. Not only they have the equal rights to have dream, but also they do have same potential to achieve success. The poverty in the Indian reservation do gives Arnold despair and hopelessness, but it still can be seen...
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...of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” Sherman Alexie explains how he taught himself how to read through a Superman comic at the age of 3. He did this by imagining what the illustrations were portraying and then putting words to the pictures. He then became fascinated with reading at a young age and began reading anything and everything he could get his hands onto. He got his fascination of reading from his father who read a lot as well. Growing up Alexie was exposed to piles of books throughout his home. These included murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball biographies and anything else he could find. In this writing about his childhood Alexie makes it very clear that as a minority he refused to fail and fall into the stereotype surrounding his Native American heritage. He knew he wanted to learn, and that he loved to read. According to the writing, most Indians in that time were expected to be short, quiet and uncommunicative in-front of their non-Indian teachers, and did not want to speak up or seem smart in the classroom, especially at the young age Alexie was. Therefore they were comfortable around other Indians but came off as completely un-intelligent around non-Indians. He always spoke out in class and asked questions, he was not afraid to stand out, because he knew it was not necessarily a bad thing. Alexie describes a smart Indian viewed as “a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike” (29). Despite this, he refused to fail...
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...In the essay “Superman and Me”, an extended metaphor is used to explain the connection between the author and Superman. Superman and the author have had a strong connection for a long time. When Sherman Alexie was three years old, he picked up a Superman comic while lying in the floor. Alexie’s dad always brought home books all the time, so Alexie read all the time. Superman and the author have always been together through Alexie’s childhood, school days, and adulthood. In Alexie’s childhood he was teased for being an indian child so he decided to stand out from the rest. “ I learned to read with a Superman comic.” This explains that Alexie was a young prodigy in school while others struggled. “I was three years old…” This shows that Alexie...
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...Heaven" Sherman Alexie writes about the importance of songs and stories in the lives of the people on the reservation through drug induced visions, the character of Thomas Builds-A-Fire, Jimi Hendrix's music, and basketball players on the reservation. In the short story a drug called tradition the main character, Victor, and his two friends Thomas Builds-a-Fire and Junior take drugs that give them visions of themselves in strange historical Indian settings. The stories they tell of these visions relate to Indian culture and tradition. Junior has a vision of Thomas performing a dance around a campfire that brings back all the dead Indians. Victor has a vision of Junior singing. Both visions include real things from history, end with the idea of the Indians winning and/or driving out the white people, and use music or dance to show this. This shows their...
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...Sherman Alexie ENG 150 – Critical Analysis Assignment Fingerprints Recently, I was introduced to a man named Sherman Alexie. See, what I liked about Sherman from the beginning was the dissimilarity we shared. Too often, as a society we get so caught up in the bait of commonality that we forget it’s the differences that make us individuals. His family was not like mine. The significant values that shape a young man’s life, like Sherman’s and mine, were founded on different life experiences and were respected on unfamiliar levels. I came to see he loved differently and for different reasons. He esteemed for different reasons and his perception on life was remarkable yet understated. Sherman had a way of seeing things… the realness he bestowed was astonishing, but more importantly, he was able to help me see differently too. You’re asking, “Where did you meet this Sherman Alexie?” The answer to that question is difficult to state because I feel like I’ve known him my whole life, but I doubt he’d say the same of me. The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian is a novel by Sherman Alexie written for anyone willing to read it. It displays his inner deepest thoughts through the story of a young man named Junior. The great thing about being introduced to a man through his work is that he reveals himself to you through nothing but the deepest and best thoughts; and Sherman had many. Sherman Alexie was a Native American who grew up on a reservation in Spokane...
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...“The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” How does this Sherman Alexie essay compare to the Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X essays we read earlier in the semester? What implications does Alexie invoke with his use of the Superman imagery? In comparing the three essays, “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie, to “Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglass and “Learning to Read” by Malcolm X, one immediately recognizes that all three authors place high importance on the value of reading and writing. When one has the ability to read and write, one has the ability to achieve many goals. One also has the ability to make a difference in the lives of others and society. In “Learning to Read” by Frederick...
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...them, with bullet and fist and saber and boot” (Flight 89, 90). Sherman Alexie is an American novelist, filmmaker, short story writer, and poet. He uses his personal experiences as a Native American to write raw and unvarnished texts that bring forth complicated emotions. You can see an example of Alexie’s unique writing style in the quote above where he boldly states the way violence takes place in his story. As a writer, Alexie targets young adults and teens who may be struggling in their younger years just as he has. Throughout his life, even as a young boy, Alexie had been dealing with struggles and problems in his life. At six months old, Alexie underwent a brain surgery which had a high risk of death or mental disability if he survived (The...
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...Name: Institution: Course: Date: What you pawn I will redeem. Sherman Alexie, tells a story that consumes his attention and energy. In his start and deep narration of “What you pawn I redeem”, Alexie explicitly shows American Indians as living by their own values and their own typical standards in which they are discriminated and sidelined against. He explains how relationships haven’t worked for the character and how he withdrew his mentality and disappeared from them. The relationships fostered in the story have many similarities throughout the narration. Addiction to alcoholic liquor is a character that is common among Inuit and American Indians. Outsiders could call it a stereotype but Alexie calls it a “cold dark truth”. Many American Indians feel that they have lost their distinctive quality as a race. They are part of the new America but they still live in reservations. Many American Indians either presently struggle with alcoholism or have struggled with addiction to alcoholism in the past. Alexie’s father died due to alcoholic related issues and Alexie himself is struggling out of alcoholism. Democrats could love, deeply admire and care for them but they still are conservative within. The main character only associates with Indians irrespective of the tribe they come from. He lives by fate, with the help of those willing to help (Moyers, Bill 1). But he still has his set of principles and doesn’t wish anyone could offer him guidelines on how to live his life. The...
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