The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Alexie, Sherman with Forney, Ellen. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little Brown & Company, 2007

A National Book Award Winner and a New York Times Bestseller, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is as funky as its title promises. Illustrated with always-delightful, sometimes sardonic cartoons of Ellen Forney, it traces a year in the life of a Washington State indigenous high school person who chooses to go to a school off-reserve, hence the “Part-time Indian.” Although the reservations in the USA and the reserves in Canada and the people who live in each are not identical by any means, Part-time Indian will resonate with readers north of the border, especially with both indigenous and settler persons living in what we used to call “The Kamsack Situation,” a case of sometimes-troubled interaction between a settler town and an adjacent reserve.

Arnold Spirit (Junior) “is a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Born with a variety of medical problems, he is picked on by everyone but his best friend, leaves the rez to attend an all-white school in the neighboring farm town where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Despite being condemned as a traitor to his people and enduring great tragedies, Junior attacks life with wit and humor and discovers a strength inside of himself that he never knew existed (Book cover blurb).”

Part-time Indian will probably be found in the Juvenile Fiction section in most libraries, and certainly the vocabulary, the straightforward simplicity of the plot suggest a juvenile audience. But in this age of reconsidering residential schools and Truth and Reconciliation in Canada particularly, I would caution that the novel could reinforce stereotypes rather than clarify; it lacks the historic background that’s badly needed to help us understand why an indigenous author in a juvenile fiction would write:

“Gordy gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Well I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn’t know Indians. And he didn’t know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reason: the fricking booze.”

Fictional Arnold has good reason to be bitter, particularly after a succession of tragedies—all involving alcohol—beset his family. It’s a repeated motif: having scarcely enough money for mounting a celebratory Christmas, his father takes it all and goes on a ten day binge. Get drunk, do something stupid or tragic, repent sorrowfully, repeat, repeat.

It was probably in the sixties/seventies that we began to talk about alcoholism as an illness. That “epiphany” probably opened the door to better addiction treatment, but it didn’t simplify much except that the diagnosis was now obvious. Illness implies a cause and an effect, and in the case of the high level of alcoholism on reserves, it’s the grappling with the germ, the virus, the cause that needs consideration. Illness, after all, also cries for remedy; remedy, to be successful, addresses the cause, not just the symptoms. Part-time Indian doesn’t address this; as a work of art—and not a piece of propaganda or medical analysis—it probably shouldn’t. But if it were to lead young readers to a greater understanding that Arnold’s dilemma has precursors, it might well work to contribute to the search for ways to tackle causes.

In Canada, that search is called Truth and Reconciliation.

Part-time Indian introduces readers to the concept of the apple-indian, i.e. “red on the outside, white on the inside.” People who are born into and live their lives in a majority culture can never fully comprehend this aspect of visible-minority life. African-Americans have their oreo cookies; the tensions on both sides of such an “are you in or are you out” reality are central to Part-time Indian, and the Discussion Guide appended to the novel should help in introducing the implications of this vital divide to readers. In Arnold Spirit’s world, pursuing aspirations for achievement rests completely on risking the “traitor” label and its consequences.

Rowdy is the nickname of Arnold’s doppelganger, a childhood friend who remains in school on the reservation and personifies the red exterior of the “apple,” what Arnold might have been. Their love/hate, off/on relationship is beautifully captured in a one-on-one basketball encounter that goes on for hours—without keeping score.

Those of us who spend appreciable amounts of time reading do so for various reasons. If the primary purpose is diversion, amusement, then a novel's possible insights into our personal realities may not even register. For others, the search for “truth” may well include the study of fiction for clues and insights. Writer Tim O’Brien has put it like this: “Fiction is the lie [invention, story] that helps us understand the truth.”  

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, scores on both counts; I was diverted, amused, and what insights I felt I already had into the part-time Indian issue were sharpened, given a new slant.

Stars seem inappropriate since their assigning implies a comparison to other novels. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is unique; comparisons are therefor meaningless. Suffice it to say that I read all of it; I don’t stick with published material that lacks quality—in my biased, snooty, English-teacher opinion, that is.

ARE YOU SURE YOU'VE GOT IT RIGHT?

ARE YOU SURE YOU'VE GOT IT RIGHT?

A review of Enns, Peter. The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires our Trust more than our “Correct” Beliefs. New York: Harper One (an Imprint of Harper Collins), 2016

“Faith crisis,” “loss of faith,” “beset by doubt.” I'm sure most of us have heard the expressions that signal a divide between what one has been taught as essential belief and what is experienced in life. Something as simple as the horror of losing a daughter to a senseless car accident and attempting to sing along in church the words, “God will take care of you,Through ev'ry day, O’er all the way . . .”  

In The Sin of Certainty, Peter Enns explores the dark chapters in a Christian's life that can be psychologically devastating or, more drastically, can lead to the abandonment of all faith. Enns uses his own experiences as the springboard for arguing that certainty as regards belief is not only dangerous to our trust in God, but is not Biblically mandated. To support the latter, he draws primarily on the agonies of abandonment and doubt evident in the writings of Psalms, Job and Ecclesiastes.

Readers can probably be forgiven for some puzzlement over the vocabulary. What's the difference between belief in God and faith in God, for instance? Is it reasonable to make believing in God and trusting in God alternative choices, or are we talking about distinctions without real differences? We protestants, at least, have a history of calling ourselves believers and the packet of what shall be believed if one is a Mennonite, for instance, has been enunciated from time to time in faith confessions with weighty significance. These are the things we collectively and individually hold to be true, what we believe. Not whom or what we trust or put our confidence in, but what we hold to be non-negotiable truth. What we believe.

They're not primarily faith confessions, though, they're belief pronouncements. Enns doesn't write about confessions much: “I'm not against creeds or talking about what I believe. But as it's used in the Bible, believing doesn't focus on what someone believes in, but in whom one places his or her trust. (p.93)” Even belief as we've come to use it can't be legislated (creedified?) since experience renders it fluid. But trust can be nurtured into a solid foundation not dependent on belief or faith, or even the bright or dark experiences of life. Enns' sub-title reads: “Why God Desires Our Trust more than our 'Correct' Beliefs.”

I attend and participate in a Mennonite congregation. In this congregation, beliefs vary, especially on emerging questions like assisted death, abortion, same-gender marriage, etc. On the ancient beliefs regarding the nature of God (person or force), the majority express their understanding of God as person. That's not my concept of the Biblical entity called God, but I've found that although the belief about God's nature varies, the worship and work that follow from either belief can be the same—give or take. It's a clear illustration of the principle that if preserving unity is important—that we all must hang our hats on the same peg to achieve it—it better be Trust in God, not belief in a catalog of prescribed items.

But there is a puzzle there that Enns' book doesn't seem to appreciate fully: how does one trust God if one comes to doubt that God exists? And by the same token, how does one trust fully an entity whose existence one no longer fully believes in? Using my earlier example of untimely family tragedy, how does one sing, “God will take care of you,” after concluding that God does not reach down and prevent vehicles bearing our children from leaving the road and crashing? But Enns is right in pointing out that crises of faith—of believing—are common to everyone, and that the pressure to keep singing, “God will take care of you,” whether you believe it literally, figuratively or not at all, is powerful.

So hold it in and muddle through your life, keeping it all quiet, trying not to think about the lost faith you now mourn, and hoping nobody brings it up. Or, after you have tried to hold it in for a while, it may reach a point where the pressure is too much and explodes into a full-on crisis. We need to talk about this.” (emphasis mine) p-9.

I've experienced personally the repercussions that can follow from admitting in a church setting the loss of even one assumed, hitherto-common belief. The reaction follows less from the loss itself, but more from the exposing of such a loss to the air where it must be acknowledged and talked about, or pointedly denied and its author resented for creating waves with which nobody is prepared to deal. Who hasn't bottled up a personal dilemma out of the fear of this consequence? As Hamlet puts it in Shakespeare's play—on another subject: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of thought . . . (III,i)”

The Sin of Certainty could serve as a discussion starter, perhaps, if a group could be found with the courage to discuss the subject frankly. You'll find plenty of criticism of the “trust over belief” message on line; it's not hard to locate the push-back. Controlling the canon of belief is, after all, the controlling of the membership and denominations are loathe as is any government to give it up.

There are problems with The Sin of Certainty I would have pointed out, were I its editor, beginning with the word Sin in the title. My suggestion might have been, The Hazards of Certainty; my reasoning would have been that even an unwavering trust in God must lean on a kind of certainty, making the title self-defeating. Secondly, I know that to publish hard cover, adult books, a certain number of pages are expected (generally upwards of 200 or so) and The Sin of Certainty has the feel of being padded to reach a number; the argument could have been made well—maybe even better—in, say, a twenty-page essay. Thirdly, the style of writing seeks to be too contemporary, too hep, too informal for the subject at hand. But that may be my bias talking.

Michael Hakmin Lee writing in Christianity Today puts the conundrum of certainty and doubt rather well, in my opinion. I conclude with a portion of his article:

“The reality of intra-Christian theological disagreements has led some to conclude that there is something inherently wrong with the Christian faith itself. On the other hand, I do not think the solution is to downplay the place of confidence or even certainty in faith. While I believe there is commonly within evangelicalism an undercurrent of misplaced optimism in our ability to objectively understand truth in an unfiltered way which needs to be challenged, more than the pursuit of certainty itself, it is what we choose to place our confidence in that is the issue. Let me share a few examples:

• We should be confident that God exists, but more tentative in our incomplete and inevitably distorted claims of what God is like, which tends to portray God in our culturally informed image.
• We should have the highest confidence that God will accomplish what God has set out to do in the course of history, just more tentative in how this will unfold.
• We should be certain that God has spoken to us through the prophets, apostles, and ultimately through Jesus, and that Scripture captures these divine revelations, but we should be more tentative in what we affirm about the
  Bible itself and what we discern its meanings to be.
  
  

The key is not the total suspension of confidence or even 

certainty, but rather the judicious placement of 

confidence and trust.”

That—in an eggshell—is what The Sin of Certainty is all about.