Junior is uninhibited when it comes to expressing his feelings about the rampant alcoholism on his reservation. He has seen firsthand how alcohol has ruined the lives of a number of his fellow tribespeople, claiming that about ninety percent of the forty-two funerals he has attended in his young life were for people who died from alcohol-related causes. Over the course of the novel, Grandmother Spirit, Eugene, and Mary all die because of alcohol. After his sister's funeral, Junior cries, thinking, "I was crying for my tribe, too. I was crying because I knew five or ten or fifteen more Spokanes would die during the next year, and that most of them would die because of booze" (216). In fact, it is this pattern of alcoholism that forms part of
