Christina Guerra Guerra 1
Professor Judith Fourzan
Children's Literature-English 3305
October 13, 2012
The True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a very powerful book. I found myself getting very emotional reading this novel because of what Junior, the main character had to go through. Junior Spirit, in The Absolute True Diary of a Part -Time Indian by Sherman Alexie has a hard time accepting who he really is because of all the racism he experiences when he attends Reardan High School. Of course there were other factors, alcohol being the main one, he was still unable to accept whom he really was because of the way people judged him. With Junior being the only Indian at Reardan High School, he also had a lot of physical problems, he stuttered, had a skinny body, a big head, and he had an excess of cerebrospinal fluid in his skull.
Besides his health problems, he had to deal with microaggressions and trying to attain some kind of social status. According to Yosso, she states, "Probably the most grievous of offensive mechanisms spewed at victims of racism and sexism are microaggressions. These are subtle, innocuous, preconscious, or unconscious degradations, and putdowns, often kinetic but capable of being verbal and/or kinetic."(Yosso 660)
Junior, or Arnold grew up on a very poor reservation. His journey starts when he notices his mom's name in his textbook, becomes very angry, throws the book at Mr. P's head and gets suspended. During the suspension Mr. P goes to visit him and tells him to leave the school and the reservation because he had a lot of potential. That's when he transfers to Reardan High School, when he arrives he notices that he...