The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

What's inside (8 sections)

1. The textbook and Mr P
2. Reardan days
3. Basketball and the two games
4. Deaths in winter
5. Cartoons, poverty rules and what drags
6. Challenges, awards and where it lands
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked this one up because it keeps showing up in two places at once. It won the National Book Award and it sits at the top of banned lists. I wanted to see what kind of book could do both. What I found was shorter and funnier and sadder than I expected. First published September 12, 2007 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 230 pages in the first hardcover edition, ISBN 9780316013680, with art by Ellen Forney. It reads like a diary kept by a kid who draws when words get stuck.

Arnold Spirit Jr. calls himself Junior. He is fourteen and lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. He was born with water on the brain. He had surgery as a baby. He has seizures. He has poor eyesight and thick glasses. He stutters and lisps. He gets headaches. He is small. Other kids beat him up for all of it. He got the nickname Globe in school because his head looked large next to his thin body. He tells you this in the first pages without asking for pity. He just wants you to know the starting shape of his life.

His family is poor in a way that touches everything. His father Arnold drinks and disappears sometimes and still drives him places and plays piano and guitar and saxophone. His mother Agnes reads everything in fifteen minutes and remembers baseball scores and wars and lottery winners. She used to drink and stopped. His sister Mary is older and smart and funny and writes romance stories and is called Mary Runs Away because she hides in the basement. His best and only friend is Rowdy. Rowdy is lean and strong and angry. His father hits him. At school Rowdy hits other kids first. With Junior he is gentle. They read comics together. They have been friends since they were tiny.

Money runs out fast in this house. There is often not enough food. There is often not enough gas to get to town. The dog scene tells you more than any speech. Oscar is a stray they took in and Junior loves him. Oscar gets heat stroke and runs around sick and in pain. Junior calls the vet and learns it will cost hundreds they do not have. His father takes Oscar out back with a rifle because that is the only option left. Junior writes that his parents came from poor people who came from poor people all the way back. He understands and he still cries for days. I had to put the book down after that part.

School on the rez is called Wellpinit. Junior likes to learn but the building feels tired. On the first day of geometry he opens his textbook and finds his mother’s name written inside. The book is more than thirty years old. It was hers when she was a student. Something snaps in him. He thinks about how little the school has been given. He throws the book across the room. It hits his teacher Mr P in the face and breaks his nose. Junior gets suspended. He expects anger when Mr P comes to his house later. He gets something else.

The textbook and Mr P

Mr P is white and short and bald and forgetful. He often misses school. He mentored Mary years ago. He sits with Junior on the porch and says he is sorry. He says when he started teaching he was trained to beat the Indian out of children. He did it. He punished kids for speaking their language and for being proud. He says Mary was one of the smartest students he ever had and he watched her give up and stay home. He tells Junior he has to leave. If he stays at Wellpinit, he will be ground down. He will learn to stop wanting more.

That talk is the hinge of the book. Junior decides to transfer to Reardan. Reardan is a farm town high school about twenty two miles away. It is wealthy compared to Wellpinit. Almost every student is white. Junior jokes that the only other Indian at Reardan is the school mascot. His parents agree right away even though they have no car they can trust and almost no money for gas. His father drives him when he can. Sometimes Junior hitchhikes. Sometimes he walks part of the way. Sometimes he misses school because there is no ride.

Rowdy takes the news hard. Junior tells him at the Lone Pine or on the court depending how you remember playground talks, and Rowdy does not hear hope in it. He hears betrayal. You are leaving us, he says with fists more than words. He stops speaking to Junior. He calls him names when they meet. The friendship that protected Junior since childhood goes cold in a week. That loss sits under the whole first half. Junior keeps looking for Rowdy in crowds. He keeps wanting to explain and failing.

I liked how Alexie handles Mr P here. He does not make him a hero. He makes him a tired man trying to fix one thing late. The advice is right and it still costs Junior almost everything socially. Leaving is not framed as escape to a better world. It is framed as a gamble. Stay and shrink, or go and be split in two. Junior chooses split.

Reardan days

The first weeks at Reardan are lonely in a specific teenage way. Junior eats alone. He sits in the back. He draws kids around him instead of talking to them. He notices how clean the lockers are and how new the balls are in gym. He notices the rules are different. On the rez, if someone insults you, you hit back fast or you get hit every day. At Reardan, words float by and teachers step in and kids laugh it off.

Roger is the first test. Roger is big and blond and a star athlete and says racist things to Junior to get laughs. He tells a joke that treats Indians as punch lines. Junior punches him in the face without planning it. He expects a beating after school. Instead Roger looks surprised and then almost pleased. He starts saying hi in the hall. He lends Junior money for lunch. He offers rides. He becomes a strange kind of protector. It is not fully believable if you press it, and I did press it in my head. A punch fixing racism in one scene is too neat. But as a portrait of how boys sometimes bond through friction, it rang true enough to keep me reading.

Penelope comes next. She is popular and pretty and plays volleyball and wants to leave town and see the world. Junior falls for her fast. He learns she throws up after eating. He learns her father Earl says cruel things about Indians at the dinner table and still lets Junior in the house. Penelope likes that Junior draws her as she wishes she looked, and likes that he listens. For a while Junior is known as her almost boyfriend and that label lifts him. Kids who ignored him start nodding. I appreciated that Alexie shows the lift without pretending it solves anything. Popularity by dating is still borrowed.

Gordy is the friendship that felt most real to me. Gordy wears glasses and talks in proper sentences and loves books and science. He does everything in the name of research. He meets Junior in class and argues with him about books and then seeks him out at lunch. He teaches Junior how to read seriously and how to take pleasure in disagreeing. He tells Junior to read more and gives titles. Through Gordy, Junior finds a place where being smart is not a target on his back. At Wellpinit, answering in class could get you mocked for acting white. At Reardan, Gordy makes curiosity normal.

Junior keeps comparing fathers without making a speech about it. At Reardan games and plays, many white fathers never show up. They work or watch television or just do not come. His own father, broke and drinking and unreliable in other ways, drives twenty two miles each way to get him to school and waits in the parking lot. That contrast steadies Junior. He starts to see that wealth and care do not always travel together. His family has little cash and a lot of presence. That idea returns later when losses pile up.

Basketball and the two games

Coach asks Junior to try out. Junior is small and wears glasses and expects to be cut. He makes varsity. Practice is hard and funny. Coach pays no attention to race in a way that feels blunt and kind. He yells about effort and feet and hands. He becomes a father figure without replacing Junior’s father. He checks on grades. He drives him once when no ride appears. He never gives him a name in the narration, just Coach, which fits how teens file adults by role.

The season builds to two games against Wellpinit. The first is at Wellpinit. The gym is packed. Former classmates boo Junior. They turn their backs during introductions. They call him traitor. Rowdy stares through him. On the court Rowdy plays hard and angry. He knocks Junior to the floor and Junior blacks out for a bit. Wellpinit wins big. Junior’s head rings for days. Coach praises his effort in the locker room and Junior cries because praise after humiliation feels confusing.

The second game is at Reardan. Junior plays better. He guards. He shoots. He does not back down. Reardan wins. At first Junior feels triumph. Then he looks across at the Wellpinit bench and sees the faces of kids he grew up with. He sees how thin their shoes are and how little hope sits in their posture. He remembers sitting on that bench with no future he could picture. He runs to the locker room and throws up and sobs. Winning felt like proof he made the right choice and proof the choice had a price. Both feelings were true at once.

Basketball works in this book because it costs almost nothing to play and means a lot on poor courts. Alexie played at Reardan himself as a teen and was the only Indian on the team apart from the mascot, and you feel that lived detail. The drills. The bus rides. The way a town fills a gym on a cold night. Sport here is not a metaphor that floats above life. It is rides and shoes and bruises and who shows up. I liked that grounding. Where it strains is how quickly skill arrives. Junior goes from outsider to contributor fast. If you know team sports, the arc may feel compressed. I forgave it because the emotional beats around the games are exact.

Deaths in winter

After the basketball high, the book turns cold. Junior’s grandmother Spirit dies first. She is walking home from a powwow on the side of the road. A drunk driver named Gerald hits her. She never drank in her life. Her last words, as Junior reports them, are to forgive the driver. The funeral is large and sorrowful and then suddenly funny. A rich white man named Ted comes to return a powwow dance outfit he collected years ago. He wants to make amends in front of everyone. Junior’s mother looks at the beadwork and says plainly it is not even from their tribe. Ted leaves embarrassed and the whole room laughs through tears. That laugh felt earned. Grief needs air.

Eugene dies next. Eugene is his father’s best friend and like an uncle to Junior. He works as an EMT on the tribal ambulance. For a time he rides a beautiful old Indian motorcycle. He drinks heavily. After the funeral he gets drunk with his friend Bobby. They fight over the last sip of wine. Bobby pulls a gun and shoots Eugene in the face. Bobby hangs himself in jail soon after. Junior tells this in a few pages without sensational detail. Two men who loved each other in their way, drunk and poor and quick to anger, and then gone. His father weeps in a way Junior has not seen.

Mary dies last and hardest. Mary had left the rez after high school with her husband, whom she met at the casino. They moved to Montana and lived in a small trailer. She wrote and dreamed and drank. One night after a party, someone left soup boiling on a hot plate. A curtain drifted onto the heat. The trailer caught fast. Mary and her husband never woke up. Junior is told she was too drunk to wake. He replays every talk he had with her about leaving and staying. He wonders if his leaving gave her permission to go, and if going killed her. There is no answer that helps. His parents fold inward. The house goes quiet.

Alexie spaces these deaths the way life does, too close together to process. Junior starts to question the future and to see the darker patterns around alcohol on the rez. He does not stop loving his family or his home. If anything the love sharpens. He notices his mother reading late to stay steady. He notices his father showing up sober for rides to Reardan. He notices Rowdy still playing ball alone at the tribal gym. Sorrow here does not preach. It accumulates. That is why the sad parts hit without feeling staged.

Cartoons, poverty rules and what drags

The drawings change how the story lands. Forney’s art is presented as Junior’s own cartoons, about sixty five images scattered through the pages. Some are jokes about his lisp and glasses and masturbation and boners and first kisses. Some are portraits of his parents and grandmother and Rowdy that are tender and precise. Some use shifting lettering and diagrams to show how poverty works. One famous riff lists what poverty does to creativity and time. Another shows the rules for fighting white kids versus Indian kids. The mix lets a fourteen year old say things he could not say in straight prose.

Humor is doing heavy work. Junior jokes about being Indian and poor and horny and hungry in the same paragraph. That blend annoyed me once or twice and then won me over. When he jokes after Oscar dies or after his grandmother dies, it is not disrespect. It is how kids keep breathing. Teachers who use this book often say reluctant readers finish it fast because the cartoons pull them forward. I believe it. The pages turn quickly. The voice is warm and direct. You hear a smart funny friend after school, not a lecture.

Poverty is drawn as math more than mood. Gas money decides attendance. A textbook from 1970 decides science. A vet bill decides a dog’s life. Junior counts miles and dollars constantly. He hitchhikes and worries about who stops. He skips meals so his parents eat. He feels shame asking Roger for lunch money and gratitude that complicates the shame. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Reservation with an alcoholic father and hydrocephalus and government glasses, left to attend Reardan for credits, found an old textbook with his mother’s name, threw a book at a wall in anger. He has said the novel is about seventy eight percent true. That lived math shows.

What drags, fairly noted. The diary form makes the middle episodic. School scenes and crush scenes and team scenes arrive in short bursts. A few repeat. Penelope’s eating disorder and her father’s racism get introduced with care and then fade faster than they should. Gordy deserves more pages. Coach deserves a name or at least a past. Roger’s turn from bigot to buddy happens too smoothly. Readers who want tight plotting may feel the sag around the holidays. I skimmed one dance prep passage and did not miss much.

Tone will divide readers too. Jokes about bodies and sex and drinking are frank. Junior admits to fantasies and to being confused and excited and ashamed. He draws what he cannot say. Some families and classrooms will find that honest. Others will find it too much for fourteen year olds reading at twelve. Both reactions make sense to me. The book does not leer, but it does not look away either. If you hand it to a young teen, be ready to talk about those pages rather than skip them.

Challenges, awards and where it lands

This part needs plain facts because the record is long. The book won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. It won the 2008 Boston Globe Horn Book Award for Fiction and Poetry. It was named one of the best books of 2007 by School Library Journal and a Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults by the Young Adult Library Services Association. The audiobook read by Alexie won the Odyssey Award. Those honors came fast and have held.

It also became one of the most challenged books in the country. The American Library Association lists it as the most challenged book in the United States from 2010 to 2019. It appears in the ALA top ten for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2020. Reasons cited in challenges include profanity, sexual references, alcohol and drug references, violence, gambling, being viewed as anti family, religious viewpoint, and being viewed as unsuited for the age group. Districts handled it in different ways. In Antioch, Illinois in 2009 parents asked for removal from curriculum and the school kept it with an alternate summer title offered. In Prineville, Oregon the district removed it from classrooms but kept it in libraries. In Stockton, Missouri the board voted to remove it from libraries. Other towns from Wyoming to Georgia to New York reviewed it and mostly kept it with limits by grade.

I state that history without telling you what to think because the book itself does not tell you what to think. It shows a kid weighing loyalty and ambition and finding no clean answer. In the final pages Junior and Rowdy start to mend. Rowdy says Junior is the only nomad on the rez, the only one who left and kept ties, which makes him more traditional in Rowdy’s eyes than those who never moved. They play one on one without keeping score in the old angry way. They talk about postcards and visits and summer. It is not forgiveness as event. It is friendship resuming in small motions.

Who should read it. Mid teens and up who like funny sad first person stories will move through it in a few sittings. Reluctant readers who like comics will find the Forney pages a bridge. Adults who work with teens will find useful scenes for talk about code switching and class and grief. If you need steady plot or gentle humor, look elsewhere. If you want a voice that stays with you while you drive to practice or wait for a ride that may not come, Junior is good company. I closed it thinking about gas tanks and textbooks and how little separates staying from leaving, and how much.

FAQ

When was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian published?

It was first published September 12, 2007 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. The first hardcover runs 230 pages with ISBN 9780316013680.

Who are the main people in the book?

Arnold Spirit Jr. called Junior, his best friend Rowdy, his parents Agnes and Arnold, his sister Mary, teacher Mr P, and Reardan friends Penelope, Gordy, Roger and Coach.

Why has the book been challenged?

The American Library Association lists it as the most challenged book in the United States from 2010 to 2019, citing profanity, sexual references, alcohol, violence and school suitability. Some districts limited classroom use while keeping library copies.