Sherman Alexie's Indian Education

“Little kids are just dumb, the smart ones and the slow ones. They do dumb things. They say what they think. They haven’t learned enough yet to say what they don’t really think. That comes later, when kids begin to turn into people and find out that they are alone” (LeGuin 3). As children, people lack the knowledge of what to say and what to hide. When they grow older and face reality, they become more guarded and, sometimes, bitter. In Sherman Alexie’s short story “Indian Education,” the narrator of the story, Junior Polatkin, experiences many difficulties throughout his life, from never fitting in with society to his father becoming an alcoholic. He is bullied as a child and discriminated against as a teenager. However, he continues to fight. …show more content…
In seventh grade, he kisses a white girl who lives on the reservation, and he says, “But I was saying good-bye to my tribe, to all the Indian girls and women I might have loved, to all the Indian men who might have called me cousin, even brother” (Alexie 110). He realizes that by leaving the reservation, he is leaving his tribe, the Coeur d’Alene, and to them, he is betraying them. He no longer belongs to the reservation, nor does he belong to the white school. Even so, he sticks with his decision, despite feeling very cast out. In eighth grade, he listens to the sound of forced vomiting from the next room next to the sound of his empty stomach. The white girls don’t eat the food they have, for fear of living, hoping that they will be skinny, beautiful. He has no food and grows “skinny from self-pity” (Alexie 111). Junior reminds us that “there is more than one way to starve” (Alexie 111), as he eats what even the dogs will not touch because he does not want to die. He eats and grows skinny, while the girls do not eat, so that they can perhaps be beautiful. Junior struggles through near-starvation, but pushes his way through in only a few more pieces than when he …show more content…
When he collapses at a dance, a Chicano teacher assumes that he is drunk, saying, “What’s that boy been drinking? I know all about these Indian kids. They start drinking real young” (Alexie 111). For no other reason than Junior’s Indian heritage, the teacher immediately assumes that he has been drinking. What turns to be the case, however, is that Junior has diabetes. The white kids, his friends, are the ones who help him get to the hospital emergency room. In tenth grade, Junior learns how to drive. He gets his license on the day another man commits suicide by driving into a tree. Junior understands why. He says, “Believe me, everything looks like a noose if you stare at it hard enough” (Alexie 112). The life he deals with and the history he carries weigh upon his mind. The pain of knowing his tribe’s failures hangs around his neck like a chain. He has no way to escape it, and accepting it is a task beyond imagination. However, he struggles on, carrying the burden of a past that cannot be