Euprides was a Greek writer in 5th century B.C.

In one of his plays a character Medea

asks, What greater grief than the loss of ones native land? This is the topic I am
going to explore today with reference to the loss of the Native Americans. I have
connected their history and their present living conditions to a novel I found written
by Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It tells the
story of Arnold a.k.a Junior a teenager growing up in Spokane Indian Reservation.
Tired of a hopeless life of poverty on the reservation he leaves his troubled school on the
rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
Now we all know how the Native Americans were wiped out from their own land by
the European colonizers starting from the 15th and 16th centuries. It wasnt just their
land that these people lost. As the protagonist Arnold says, We Indians have LOST
EVERYTHING. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and
dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.
This fact is further reaffirmed by Juniors teacher Mr.P who confesses that, We were
supposed to kill the Indian to save the child. We were supposed to make you give up
being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We
weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.
Gramsci normally uses the word hegemony to mean the ways in which a governing power wins
consent to its rule from those it subjugates. The rule which the Colonisers exercised over the Native
Americans can said to be hegemonic since they made the Natives accept their supremacy over
them. It was to such an extent that the Natives themselves started believing that they were meant to
live a life with no hopes and stricken with poverty.
In the book Junior thinks, It sucks to be
poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing
that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that
you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start
believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can
do about it.

Its a vicious circle depicted here. The natives are marginalised in the community
and restricted to live in a certain reservation, forgotten and with no opportunities of
a better life. They are thus consecutively poor. They thus internalise the notions of
the white and start believing in them themselves. They have hopes and dreams
too, but they start to believe that they dont have a right to them since they can
never be achieved by Indians. As Junior puts it in the novel, But we reservation
Indians don't get to realize our dreams. We don't get those chances. Or choices.
We're just poor. That's all we are.
Junior becomes aware of his own plight, the plight of all his people, in the beginning
of the novel when Mr.P asking him to move out of the reservation for schooling
seems to be the catalyst for him to start questioning his world. Theres a
transformation of consciousness, or conscientization as Freire would say, when he
questions why it is just the Native Americans who shoud give up on their hopes. He

thus takes a concrete step towards realising his own dreams by deciding to enrol at
Reardan high school, 20 miles away, and a school in a white dominant town.
This seems to be one way to escape the seemingly doomed life of the average
Indian. It is however not looked at favourably in the novel by the other Indians in
the reservation. To them this act is a betrayal of culture and heritage. Junior willingly
gives up his own culture to integrate with the mainstream. It reflects the melting
point ideology of America which does not allow room for incongruences.
This is just one form of escape depicted in the novel. You also have another escape
which is portrayed in Rowdy, Juniors best friend in the reservation. He is a violent
kid with equally violent parents. He beats the crap out of anything which annoys
him. This seems to be the general reaction of most Indians. Faced with a
dissatisfactory life due to white oppression they drink which leads to fighting and
which further strengthens the whites idea that Native Americans are violent and
need to be isolated. This is a vicious cycle. The idea of integrating with the
mainstream while still preserving ones identity seems preferable in contrast.
Talking about identities, The European colonisers initially colonised to civilise the so
called savage people. In the beginning, they even made sure that they destroyed
their culture and made them as similar to themselves as possible. But midway
through the cause seems to have digressed since even after making them
civilised they still looked upon them as the other. Hypocrisy.
This case of the Europeans destroying their culture and giving them a new one,
caused a great deal of confusion among the natives regarding their own identity.
They were neither completely Indian nor American. They lived in the space in
between. When Junior goes to Reardan, the white school, he is asked his name.
There he tells us My name is Junior. And my name is Arnold. Its Junior and Arnold.
Im both. I feel like two people two different people in the same body. The identity
crisis of the entire native American race seems to be embodied in his personal
crisis.
His identity as a Native American also causes him to be marginalised initially in his
new school. In a school full of whites, an Indian kid sticks out like a sore thumb. Not
just this, the Indians themselves have an isolated reservation described in the novel
as being located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion
miles west of Happy. This depicts how native americans are marginalised as the
other.
It seems to be resolved in the end with the conclusion that Arnolds identity is
shaped by several things, not just one factor. He belongs to the tribe of poverty,
tribe of pasta lovers, tribe of cartoonists, tribe of small-town kids etc simultaneously.
The history which we usually concern ourselves with is blinkered as it tells us only
about the European colonisation while leaving out the gory details. The escape from

this oppression seems to be portrayed in the form of Arnold finally beating his best
friend Rowdy at basketball which is catalysed by a single shot in basketball. This
single shot seems to be representative of the small spark which is required for
people to become more aware of their state of being oppressed, reflect and take
action about it.
There is no right way of going about it though. Junior does it by joining hands with
the White people while still retaining his identity. Nellie Wong and Cherrie Moraga
did the same since they conveyed the plight of their races by communicating in
English, an inherently European language. It does thus seem to be the idealistic way
of moving ahead. Just questioning the reasons behind certain customs and taking
action upon it the work of the radicals.