How might a person
stay afloat while being metaphorically drowned by their surroundings? This is a
problem that Junior, the protagonist in the novel The Absolutely True
Diaries of a Part-Time Indian, faces throughout his life. Junior is able to
overcome this problem by looking at things from a different perspective. Throughout
his first year in high school, Junior is thrown challenges that he has to
overcome in order to fulfill his goal. Junior’s goal is to become his own
person and break off from his Indian tribe without disappointing them. However,
everything Junior does ends up disappointing someone, whether it be his tribe
or the new people he has met outside the tribe. Junior always feels that no
matter what he does that he will fail. Junior eventually realizes that
everything is beautiful if you just look at it from a different perspective. A
story he is told about a horse allows him to come to grips with what he wants
to do in his life and achieve more than what is expected. Junior allows
himself to achieve more by grasping his generosity because he realizes that
whatever he does will affect others around him and he benefits from this by
looking at his experiences from a different perspective.
Junior is able to
look at the story about the horse from a different perspective and relate it
back to his own life. The story involves a “stupid horse” that drowns in a lake
near the reservation called Turtle Lake. Junior sees the lake as the
reservation that he is living in and he relates the horse to himself. This
symbolizes how Junior feels about his life on the reservation. He feels that he
is being drowned by his life on the reservation and that he isn’t able to fulfill
what he is capable of. He realizes that if he stays on the reservation, he
won’t be able to fulfill his dreams of becoming his own person and breaking
away from his tribe. At one point, Junior’s geometry teacher, Mr. P, pays a
visit to him and expresses to him that if he were to just leave the reservation
that he’d be much better off. He explained to Junior that his sister (Junior’s)
was the same way. She had much more to offer than what was expected of her on
the reservation but was never able to realize it because she lived on the
reservation her whole life. She never even gave herself a chance to live up to
what she was capable of because she never chased an opportunity to. Mr. P makes
Junior realize that the only thing that kids on the reservation are learning is
how to fail. Eventually Junior realizes that if he was to stay on the
reservation that he would be walking away from his own dreams. Mr. P told him
during their conversation “You are going to find more and more hope the farther
and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation.” (43)
As the story of
the “stupid horse” continues, it begins to relate to Junior’s life more and
more. In the story, the horse eventually winds up washing up on the shore of a
lake nearby Turtle Lake called Benjamin Lake. The horse reappearing relates to
Junior because it symbolizes his decision to transfer to Reardan High School
and make a new life for himself. Reardan is a primarily white high school off
of the reservation, however transferring to the new school gives Junior the
chance to succeed and fulfill his dreams. By going to the new school, Junior is
able to get away from the life that had been drowning him back at the
reservation. This relates to the horse washing up on the shore and leaving the lake
that had drowned him behind. Junior was able to take the first step towards
fulfilling his dreams because he was able to look at his life from a different
perspective and realizing that his life at the reservation wasn’t giving him
what he wanted.
Many of the
Indians in Junior’s tribe felt that him leaving the reservation to go to a new
school, a new school full of white people, was a joke and they shunned him for
it. This relates back to the story of the “stupid horse” because after the
horse washed up on the shore, some people on the reservation burned its corpse.
“A bunch of guys threw the dead horse into the back of the truck, drove it to
the dump, and burned it.” (223) The Indians on Junior’s reservation couldn’t
handle the fact that he had broken off of their way of living and that he was
becoming his own person. The Indians in the story had burned the horse because
they felt that what it had done was wrong, and the Indians in Junior’s
reservation were doing the exact same thing to him. His mother had told him
before he transferred to Reardan that he would be treated like a traitor for
what he was about to do. This is exactly what happened on Halloween that year.
While trying to collect money for the poor with a friend he made at Reardan, he
was jumped by a group of Indian boys. Junior realized that they had only doing
that to “remind me that I was a traitor.” (79) Later, when Junior’s new school
plays his old school in basketball the Indians on the reservation continue to
punish him by chanting “Ar-nold sucks, Ar-nold sucks, Ar-nold sucks!” (143)
when he takes the court. This is a strange experience for Junior because Arnold
is his birth name, however everyone on the reservation always called him
Junior. This makes Junior really realize that he was no longer welcome on the
reservation and no longer belonged to the tribe. The reservation had removed
him from their lives just like the Indians in the story had done with the
“stupid horse”.
Even though
Junior’s tribe had removed him from their lives, he still felt that he owed it
to himself to fulfill his dreams and by doing that he was going make them
believe that he was doing the right thing. This is similar to the “stupid
horse” story because soon after the Indians had burned horse, the lake that it
had drowned in caught fire and eventually the corpse of the original horse
washed up on the shore once again. This symbolizes that no matter what the
Indians in Junior’s tribe might do to him that he will never give up and that
he will keep coming back and prove to them that he was doing nothing wrong. He
wasn’t going to allow the tribe “burning” him to keep him from fulfilling his
dreams, so he continued to attend Reardan and thrive.
Eventually, the
story of the “stupid horse” ends when the Indians on the reservation decide to
just leave it alone until it just rotted away. This relates to how the Indians
in Junior’s tribe eventually felt about him. Junior was going to become his own
person and break away from them no matter what they did to him. Junior’s ability
to look at the experiences he had from a different perspective allowed him to
stay headstrong on his quest to fulfill his dreams. He allowed himself to be all
right with what his fellow Indians had said and done to him because he knew
what he was doing was right. He realized that the only reason that they had
shunned him was because they were all afraid to do what he had done. “I wept
because I was the only one who was brave and crazy enough to leave the rez.”
(217) Junior was going to accomplish his goal because he was had enough courage
to go out and chase them.
The story of the “stupid horse” basically
summarizes Junior’s life. The story relates to all of the experience he had in
his first year of high school. Junior was able to live up to his potential
because he didn’t follow the paths of his peers. He knew that he needed to
break of from the norm and live his own life and become his own person. The
story of the “stupid horse” is about a horse that was drowned in a river and
kept coming back to torture the people that had insulted him. This is just what
Junior did by breaking off of the reservation and showing them just what he
could accomplish by not allowing himself to be confined by what they thought
was right. Junior eventually was “set free” by the people that had shunned him,
just like the “stupid horse”. Two outcasts that did what was considered wrong,
in order to do what they knew was right.
