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The Absolutely True Diary: A Part-Time Indian

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Are sports and competition in general just a games that we shouldn’t be so emotional about, or do they provide an outlet for many people, and can they teach valuable life lessons?
I played two sports growing up, baseball and basketball. I enjoyed both but I developed a passion for basketball more than for baseball. I started playing ball when I was in the third grade. My dad coached my older brother and me, and that's when I started to fall in love with the game. In 6th grade I started to play more competitively, when I made the Lake Stevens AAU basketball team. (AAU is select basketball where teams travel to tournaments and such). Unfortunately I wasn’t the most talented out there, so my playing time was limited. I remember the first game of the season I didn’t play the whole game, and I …show more content…

Nobody should like losing. Competition teaches that losing is not okay. They also teach that one can grow and learn from losses and that losing is a part of life. They should teach that one should strive to win, and thus they should want to win more than lose in life. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, Arnold the main character is being interviewed by a sports reporter before the big game against Arnold's old school on the Spokane Indian reservation, Arnold is asked if he has anything to prove in this game, and he responds, "I have to prove that I am stronger than everybody else. I have to prove that I will never give up. I will never quit playing hard. And I don't just mean in basketball. I'm never going to quit living life this hard, you know? I'm never going to surrender to anybody. Never, ever, ever."(190). Throughout this book Arnold had been pushed around his whole life, but basketball has given him the opportunity to not be pushed around anymore, and taught him things about himself that he may not have known

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In life you have many choices. One of which is deciding whether or not you are going to succeed or fail in life. In other words, choosing to stay hopeful or not. In the “Absolute True Diary of a Part- Time Indian” Junior goes through many situations where hope is needed. The author Sherman Alexie puts Junior as well as other characters in situations to make those hard decisions.

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The book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian and the movie Smoke Signals are similar stories, but very different. Both of the main characters Junior and Victor are Indians that leave the reservation. Death is a huge part of both stories. In Junior’s story Eugene, his grandmother, and his sister all die. In victor’s story his father dies.

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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian should be taught at DHS. It teaches a person about reality and about the struggles of the world, yes it uses profanity and sexual, but it shows what can happen to a teenager and showing them what could happen to them. The absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a wonderful and fantastic book. Reardan, the all white school Junior transfers to, is about 23 miles off the reservation. This means he either has to hitchhike or walk because his family can’t afford the money for gas, that could be someone in a teen in Douglas community.

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In “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” internal and external expectations shaped Junior’s life by giving him the strength to grow and give him a reason to live. Growing up in a discriminated Indian reservation, external expectations told Junior to never leave the reservation for something better. “Reservations were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear” (216). Everyone around Junior created this picture that Indians were expected to never stray from the reservation.

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Have you ever lost someone you loved or was important in your life? Well Junior has, he has lost many people in his life. He has gone to a total of 42 funerals in his lifetime and he is only 14. You will find out more about Junior in the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Most of the people Junior has lost were due to alcohol.

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Prejudice means on how people judge somebody because of race or religion, an example From the book itself "The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian," whites were prejudiced to Indians and even the Indians were prejudiced toward the main character, Arnold for switching to a white school. An example to provide that there was prejudice in the novel like when Roger and Penelope thought that people in Arnold 's reservation were rich because there were a lot of casinos in his area, but the truth was that everyone in Arnold 's reservation were alcoholics that lived in poverty. For example, like Arnold 's father, he was an alcoholic and so tired, they wouldn 't have any food to eat for dinner, and they would starve for nearly every night. And going on this, Arnold didn 't tell anybody that he was poor so he would say he was rich and it was released out when he was at the dance and he was asked if he was poor and he responded saying

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Sherman Alexie wrote The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to convey a mood by making its readers feel the anger and sadness that others who experience stereotypes feel and how that eventually results in implicit bias and prejudice. One harmful reality for Native Americans is implicit bias that has resulted from stereotypes. Implicit bias is a type of bias that influences judgments, how you act, and decisions even if it happens unknowingly(NIH). In chapter 1, “The Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club”, Juniors dentist gave him less pain meds because he believed that Indians felt less pain. To show how he felt about this and how the dentist said it, Junior wrote”Our white dentist believed that Indians felt less pain so he gave us half the

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In his book the Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie portrays a teenage boy, Arnold Spirit (junior) living in white man’s world, and he must struggle to overcome racism and stereotypes if he must achieve his dreams. In the book, Junior faces a myriad of misfortunes at his former school in ‘the rez’ (reservation), which occurs as he struggles to escape from racial and stereotypical expectations about Indians. For Junior he must weigh between accepting what is expected of him as an Indian or fight against those forces and proof his peers and teachers wrong. Therefore, from the time Junior is in school at reservation up to the time he decides to attend a neighboring school in Rearden, we see a teenager who is facing tough consequences for attempting to go against the racial stereotypes.

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“In the middle of a crazy drunk life, you have to hang on the good and sober moments tightly.” (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie page 216) This is a quote from the book that shows how Junior learns how to appreciate the good moments in life. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie the character Junior faces problems caused by drinking. The book starts off with his family living on the Indian reservation suffering from poverty and death.

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Overcoming a challenge, not giving up, and not being afraid of change are a few themes demonstrated in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Perhaps the most prominent theme derived from the novel is defying the odds, or in other words rising above the expectations of others. Junior Spirit exemplifies this theme throughout the entirety of the book. As Junior is an Indian, he almost expects that he will never leave the reservation, become an alcoholic, and live in poverty like the other Indians on the reservation—only if he sits around and does not endeavor to change his fate. When Junior shares the backstory of his parents, he says that his mother and father came from “poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people” (11).

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ANELISWA NALA 2015317601 ENGL1624 DUE: 28 OCTOBER 2016 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has one mutual theme that associates all the other themes in the novel together. In the chapter titled; “Valentine Heart,” we encompass the most prominent and most cognisant theme of them all- grief. This chapter conveys the most detectable attributes of grief that functions as both an individual and collective process of dealing with loss. Argumentatively one could say that grieving has its fair share of adversities.

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