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- Consider the adjectives, “absolutely true”
and “part-time.” What concepts appear to be
emphasized by the images and the title? Does
the cover appear to reference Junior’s internal
struggle, or a struggle between Junior and the
white power structure, or both, or neither?
- By drawing cartoons, Junior feels safe. He
draws “because I want to talk to the world. And
I want the world to pay attention to me.” How
do Junior’s cartoons (for example, “Who my
parents would have been if somebody had paid
attention to their dreams” and “white/Indian”)
show his understanding of the ways that racism
has deeply impacted his and his family’s lives?
- When Junior is in Reardan (the white
town), he is “half Indian,” and when he is in
Wellpinit (his reservation), he is “half white.” “It
was like being Indian was my job,” he says, “but
it was only a part-time job. And it didn’t pay
well at all.” At Reardan High, why does Junior
pretend he has more money than he does, even
though he knows “lies have short shelf lives”?
- Junior describes his reservation as “located
approximately one million miles north of Important
and two billion miles west of Happy.”
Yet when he and Rowdy look down from almost
the top of an immense pine, he says, “We could
see our entire world. And our entire world,
at that moment, was green and golden and
perfect.” What forces drive the dichotomy of
Junior’s perceptions of his world and allow him
to see the land in apparently disparate ways?
- Cultural outsiders who write young adult
fiction tend to romanticize the impoverishment
of Indians. Junior is having none of this: “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 that you’re
destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and
there’s nothing you can do about it. Poverty
doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons
about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches
you how to be poor.” How does Junior’s direct
language address this stereotypical portrayal
of Indians? What about his language draws the
teen reader into the realities of his life?
- Junior’s parents, Rowdy’s father, and others
in their community are addicted to alcohol,
and Junior’s white “friend with potential,”
Penelope, has bulimia. “There are all kinds of
addicts, I guess,” he says. “We all have pain. And
we all look for ways to make the pain go away.”
Compared to the characters in Jon Hassler’s
young adult novel, Jemmy (Atheneum, 1980),
how does Junior’s understanding of addiction
transcend ethnicity and class?
- Junior refers to his home reservation as
“the rez,” a familiar name for the place he
was born, the place his friends and relatives
for many generations back were born and are
buried, and the land to which he is tied that, no
matter how bad things get, will now and forever
be called “home.” What would Junior think of a
cultural outsider, such as Ian Frazier, who visits
a reservation to gather material for a book and
then calls his book “On the Rez”?
- At Junior’s grandmother’s funeral, Junior’s
mother publicly gives a white billionaire his
comeuppance to the delight of the whole community.
“And then my mother started laughing,”
Junior says. “And that set us all off. It was the
most glorious noise I’d ever heard. And I realized
that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and
displaced and crazy and mean but, dang, we
knew how to laugh. When it comes to death,
we know that laughter and tears are pretty
much the same thing. And so, laughing and crying, we said goodbye to my grandmother. And
when we said goodbye to one grandmother,
we said goodbye to all of them. Each funeral
was a funeral for all of us. We lived and died
together.” How does this reflect a cultural
insider’s perspective and how does it disrupt
stereotypes about stoic Indians?
- “I’m fourteen years old and I’ve been to
forty-two funerals,” Junior says. “That’s really
the biggest difference between Indians and
white people.” In the community of Wellpinit,
everyone is related, everyone is valued, everyone
lives a hardscrabble life, everyone is at risk
for early death, and the loss of one person is a
loss to the community. Compare Wellpinit to
Reardan, whose residents have greater access
to social services, health care, and wealth, and
people are socially distanced from each other.
How does Junior use this blunt, matter-of-fact
statement to describe this vast gulf between an
impoverished Indian community and a middleclass
white town just a few miles away?
- In many ways, Junior is engulfed by the
emotional realities of his life and his community.
Yet his spare, matter-of-fact language and his
keen sense of irony help him to confront and
negotiate the hurt, the rage, and the senselessness
of Wellpinit’s everyday realities. How does
Junior use language to lead readers, whose lives
may be very different from his own, to the kind
of understanding that they will not get from
young adult fiction whose writers do not have
this kind of lived experience?
- Cultural markers can be defined as the
behaviors, speech patterns, ways of seeing the
world, ethics, and principles that identify a person
as belonging to a particular culture. When
Rowdy and Junior play one-on-one at the end
of the book—and they don’t keep score—how is
their friendship solidified by their deep knowing
of who they are and what they come from?
Questions courtesy of the Official Sherman Alexie site www.fallsapart.com.
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