The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Junior’s decision to transfer to Reardan quickly creates a rupture between him and Rowdy. Rowdy’s anger and violence suggest how abandoned and hurt he feels that Junior is leaving. Rowdy feels betrayed by Junior’s leaving, and so he betrays Junior by punching him, which Junior thought Rowdy would never do. The double betrayal creates a schism between the boys that they’ll spend most of the book trying to repair. We might interpret Rowdy’s painful scream not just as a response to Junior’s departure, but also a scream symbolic of centuries’ worth of cultural trauma at the hands of White people. This moment shows the beginning of the rift in Junior’s identity—a rift that characterizes the novel’s main conflict.

Junior attributes the long list of Reardan’s wins over Wellpinit to the White students’ abilities: their athleticism, their intelligence, and their beauty. He describes the students as “beautiful and smart and epic,” but he fails to recognize the Rearden students as beneficiaries of years’ worth of institutional privilege. Their wins are not necessarily because the Reardan students are smarter or more athletic, but because their school has been uplifted and supported by White power structures for years, while Wellpinit’s school has been underserved and neglected. At fourteen, Junior has some inkling of this institutional problem, but he lacks the language to articulate it; instead, he conflates Reardan’s victories over Wellpinit with hope. Following his line of thinking, hope here is almost entirely synonymous with White privilege, though Junior isn’t quite sure that’s what he’s trying to say. He uses a cartoon of a flying horse to further work out what hope means to him: the word “white” appears many times in the cartoon, suggesting that there is a racialized element to hope. While he allows Whiteness might be part of it, he also envisions hope as something more magical, something not entirely human.

The question of Junior’s identity—who he is and where he belongs—is central to the book and begins to take shape in these chapters. Junior’s cartoon shows the literal split he feels, and it reflects his binary understanding of identity while using humor. On the “White” side of his body, he conflates hope with Whiteness, wealth, and opportunity; the “Indian” side reflects “bone-crushing reality” and poverty. Penelope’s snidely jokes that Junior doesn’t know his own name in “Grandmother Gives Me Some Advice,” which is an apt assessment of the disjointed identity that Junior feels while attending Reardan and living on the reservation. Much of the book will focus on Junior’s attempts to reconcile these halves of his personality which are seemingly in conflict. As he begins at Reardan, Junior feels increasingly cut off from his tribe, but the positive interactions with grandmother and his father’s best friend, Eugene, reaffirm Junior’s community ties on the reservation and the love he feels for his Indian community.

At Reardan, Junior is in a completely new world that he struggles to understand. Junior’s long list of “The Unofficial and Unwritten Spokane Indian Rules of Fisticuffs” demonstrate how well he understands life on the reservation, and it also reveals the pervasive, often nonsensical violence that exists there. On the reservation, violence is a means of communication and asserts power. Crying is a surefire way to lose. While misogyny exists on the reservation, fighting appears to be an equalizer, taking place not just among the men but among the women. As Junior understands, however, not all knowledge is transferable, and though punching Roger works out for him in this instance, he realizes he’ll have to learn the rules of the White world he now partially inhabits.