Fighting in "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"

To steal from Malcolm X, the indigenous people of the Americas didn’t land on Plymouth rock; Plymouth rock landed on them.  The occupation and struggle at Standing Rock is just the most recent manifestation of the fight that indigenous people are involved in going all the way back to 1492.  Sherman Alexie himself explains that he writes “to give [young adults] weapons – in the form of words and ideas – that will help them fight their monsters” (Alexie,   Why the Best…).  It is within this angle – an angle of fighting the monster of white supremacy - that I re-read a chapter from Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

In the chapter appropriately titled, “How to Fight Monsters,” Junior describes, “The Unofficial and Unwritten Spokane Indian Rules of Fisticuffs.”  The rules essentially trap Spokane Indians into a cycle of violence as retribution against insults, the government agencies meant to manage American Indians and white people on the reservation (Alexie, The Absolutely… 61 – 62).  It’s soon after laying out these rules that “Roger the Giant” tells Junior an ultra-racist joke and in return, Junior punches him in the face.  Roger, a white male at the white school, calls Junior, “an animal,” and walks away from him.  Junior, being conditioned in the rules of violence for Indians and not white people, is confused at the response and even yells the question, “What are the rules?” as Roger and his friends depart (Alexie 64-66).  In this scene during lunchtime, Roger comes to represent the violent white supremacist elements of USAmerican culture.  Roger insults African and Native Americans and is shocked when the scrawny Indian kid responds with physical violence, but Roger doesn’t fight back.  He doesn’t have too: the white supremacist society is already doing it for him systemically.  The shock Roger experiences can be likened to the shock felt by USAmericans after 9/11 – the greatest purveyor of violence in the world (the USA) cannot comprehend being the target of mass violence.  The rules laid out for Spokane Indians (and most other oppressed peoples of the world) don’t give Junior that option when Roger spews racism: especially for indigenous people, fighting is the only option for resisting white supremacy whether that looks like European settler colonialism, the lingering effects of genocide, forced displacement and/or the poverty of reservation life. 

At the end of the chapter, “In Like a Lion,” which depicts the second meeting between Reardan and Wellpinit on the basketball court, Junior realizes that the white school of Reardan is the Goliath that just defeated the David of Wellpinit and admits that, “maybe my white teammates had problems, serious problems, but none of their problems were life threatening” (Alexie 195).  Whether it’s fist fights or the violence of structural poverty and the resulting privation, the indigenous people of the Americas will continue to be subjected to battles for survival until social, economic and racial justice is achieved. 

(Written Summer 2018 for a Young Adult Literature course.)