The Question of Identity in Native American Novels

It would be insightful to analyse whether the characters in other Native American novels react to difficulties in a similarly positive manner as fourteen-year-old Junior/Arnold.

Junior/Arnold is a very interesting character, because he is able toalter both his social and personal identities in a positive manner. Despite the fact that as an Indian he is not supposed to display this capacity for adaption and change, he thus brings about a series of positive changes in his life. His physical challenges represent the driving force behind these, unlike for many other people for whom such problems may provoke a spiral of negative behaviour or emotional difficulties. In contrast, Junior/Arnold, at the age of only fourteen, allows the difficulties which he experiences at his new school to encourage him to reach greater heights in his life.

American Indians in urban environment jace adapted and formed their own communities and identities.

According to Fixico (2001), American Indians in urban settings have gone to great lengths efforts to learn urban culture; however, rather than assimilating, have created their own urban identity, that of as the urban Indian set apart from the mainstream yet accepted enough to survive. Fixico (2001) states that the major strength of American Indians is their ability to adapt, a capacity which is no less apparent in an urban environment. Urban Indians have overcome many of the odds against them – whether these arise from their appearance, continuing discrimination or the legacy of historical laws – to adapt and survive

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Like any other culture, American Indian culture is constantly changing – indeed, if it did not, American Indian society would already be extinct. American Indians are alive and well, adapting to new challenges across a range of settings with great strength (Cevaal Moore 2010). Junior is a Spokane Indian, but he also belongs to the tribe of American immigrants, the tribe of basketball players, the tribe of bookworms, the tribe of cartoonists, the tribe of chronic masturbators, the tribe of teenage boys, the tribe of small-town kids, the tribe of Pacific Northwesteners, the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers, the tribe of poverty, the tribe of funeral-goers, the tribe of beloved sons, the tribe of boys who really miss their best friends. Once he realises that he belongs to so many tribes, Junior believes that everything will turn out okay (Ortiz 2010, 19).

Over the past two decades, Alexie has attributed to his characters problems that have previously gone unmentioned in relation to Native American society. His writings have provided a way of expressing what is really going on in a culture that is plagued by a range of issues (Ortiz 2010, 16). Unlike other authors, Alexie views the natural environment as irrelevant to the daily lives of Indians (Ortiz 2010, 15). The economic difficulties that Arnold and his family face limits him. When he identifies as a cartoonist, he immediately shifts to a more realistic “poor-ass reservation kid”.

Junior recognises the importance of both social and personal identity when he observes that “life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community” (Alexie 2007, 132). One way to resolve this is “to dream big to get big” (Alexie 2007, 136). When he is insulted (Arnold sucks), Junior thinks of quitting the school, but after seeing his parents and grandmother he receives renewed strength. He feels guilty for having cursed his family and believes that his grandmother’s and Eugene’s deaths are punishment for his behaviour. Junior changes because he becomes a good player, a transformation which he attributes to his newfound confidence (Alexie 2007, 180).

It is this confidence gained from his new friendships that allows him to transform himself from, in his own words, having ”always been the lowest Indian on the reservation”. He believes that he something to prove to the world and vows to never surrender (Alexie 2007, 186). Junior recognises that girls from the reservation as well as those from Reardan ignore him. However, this changes when he meets a girl called Penelope. He wants her to fall in love with him and he asks himself how to achieve this. His answer is to change the way he looks, the way he talks and the way he walks. He thereby seeks to shape his personal identity anew. One of the driving forces behind this will to change is his realisation that he is smarter than many of his white peers: when he arrived at Reardam he became less and less and less (Alexie 2007, 83).

He describes his feelings as having been “lonely, sad, isolated and terrified”. As he shares these emotions with Gordy, they become good friends. For the first time he now has friends like Gordy and Eugene who believe in him (Alexie 2007, 94). When he realises that even popular girls like Penelope have their own problems – she is bulimic and feels lonely and that nobody takes her seriously (Alexie 2007, 111) – Junior comes to see that he is not weird. His friendship with Penelope makes him popular, which in turn increases his self-esteem (Alexie 2007, 110). Junior is surprised that, despite the fact that he is poor, Penelope is willing to kiss him and he makes a new friend, Roger. At first, he is not sure whether he can survive this situation: he soon proves to be a terrible fighter, even losing fights to children half his age, indeed even losing to himself (Alexie 2007, 62-63).

However, these fights also help to secure him a reputation as a fighter. Having been a small target in the reservation, he now becomes a large one at Reardan. He is seen there as a potential killer and is called a range of names. He even becomes afraid of being killed himself. When a classmate called Rober accuses Indians of having sex with buffalos, he punches him in his face and this leaves him feeling brave. He even asks Roger if they can continue their fight after school (Alexie 2007, 65).

As the only Indian at the school, Junior’s social identity leaves him as a major target at Reardan. After fighting with Roger, he is taken to school the next day by Eugene, whom he considers an uncle, on the latter’s motorbike, thereby earning the respect of the other students, supposedly, he believes because he looks dangerous (Alexie 2007, 71). Attending this new school leaves Junior feeling as if he has two personalities: Junior, who lives on the northern side of the Spokane River, and Arnold, who lives on the south. His split personality is highlighted by the fact that he now calls himself by two names, one for each situation, and maintains two different identities every day.

After a chance encounter with the teacher, he convinces himself that he must leave the reservation or he will die. Although Junior does not understand at the time, the teacher explains to him that he is already a fighter because he has been fighting all his life with his physical problems and their consequences and that he should therefor continue to fight to improve his life. The teacher’s knowledge about his own sister and his willingness to admit that he and his fellow teachers are have been tasked with destroying Indian society and culture allows Junior to trust him and consider his words very seriously. The key ingredient that Junior needs in his life is hope, the most powerful feeling. He needs to add his hope to someone´s else and he will discover his social identity And be on the path to success.

At this point, he asks his parents about hope. They reply that white people have the most hope. It is only at this point that Junior decides to go to Reardan – immediately, in fact, because “If he doesn´t go now, he will never will” Junior recognises that he appears to be weird and ambitious. Even though he is scared of what he is doing, he believes that he cannot turn back or else he would be pummelled, mutilated and crucified. He is on a one-way bridge and there is no way to turn around (Alexie 2007, 55). His father consoles him by reminding him that he is brave and a warrior. He recognises that these words help him.

The moment that changes everything in Junior’s life is when he realises that he is using a thirty-year-old school book that once belonged to his mother. Seeing his mother´s name on it opens his eyes to his family’s poverty. One day he decides to rebel against this. He throws the book, striking Mr. P, his mathematics teacher, in the face. Although this was an accident, from then onwards his life is destined to change. The three elements of Junior’s personality become apparent here: his id rebels against this injustice, but his superego still dictates that he will not yet leave the reservation. Only when his ego pressures him to do so does he make the decision to leave. As Junior laments, he is trapped in a vicious circle because Indians are destined to be poor: “poverty doesn´t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor” (Alexie 2007, 13).

Although he might be able to change his social identity, he cannot change his race and is thus fated to remain stuck in poverty. This is also an example of how society limits his libido: although he wants to change his circumstances, he cannot because of society. Nevertheless, he is still excited about life and about school (Alexie 2007, 28). Junior begins his narrative by describing all the physical problems which he experienced and how these were solved or partially solved. These childhood experiences have shaped his social identity in the reservation: because of these problems he is called names and does not feel like he has been accepted by his community.

Consequently, he does not maintain a typically Indian social identity. This is important, because it this sense that will later be a driving force behind his decision to leave the reservation. However, this decision can also be explained by his own process of self-discovery as a teenager, an idea related to Erikson’s notion of identity crisis. Although all his problems make Junior an introverted person, he still wants to connect to others. He achieves this through his paintings, which are his way of expressing himself and talking to the world.

One of the most important issues raised by the novel is how Alexie represents a new form Native American identity. Unlike other authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich and N. Scott Momaday, who focus on the origins, traditions and spiritualism of Native American culture, Alexie portrays a character who wrestles with his beliefs and his understanding of his own people. He relies on taking risks and learning from new experiences to overcome difficulties, just as he had done while growing up on the Spokane Indian reservation (Ortiz 2010). Historically, Native American culture has been imagined as being replete with visions of mysterious people chanting around fires or riding on horseback, but Alexie has adopted a very different vision of Native American identity. Over the past two decades, Alexie has forced his characters to face up to a range of modern-day problems. In so doing, his writings have become an outlet to express what is really going on in a culture that is beset with social problems (Ortiz 2010, 16). For Alexie, nature's supposedly central role in the daily lives of Indians has become an outdated trope. (Ortiz 2010, 15).

Narrative analysis is based on Fisher´s narrative theory (1984) in which people are storytellers and view the world as a set of stories in which we choose and recreate our lives (artículo American Indian Cultural Identity) Conceptual analysis I use content analysis The data is the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian which is semi-autobiographical of Sherman Alexie. Born in 1966, Alexie grew up with his family on the Spokane/Coeur d´Alene tribal reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. His semi-autobiographical young adult novel won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in 2008 and the California Young Reader Medal in 2010 and was listed among the “Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults” by the Young Adult Library Services Association in 2008.

Data and methodology Identity is also a major issue for most adolescents, as is also the case for Junior. Teenagers shift from the identity which they have formed in relation to their parents towards embracing an identity of their very own (Pate, 2017). There are many novels in which identity is addressed. One of these is The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. This novel addresses several issues central to teenage identity. The main character in the novel negotiates his way through difficult situations in relation to his identity, as part of his family, as a learner, as a loner and as part of a clique. Many of the predicaments that the character enters into arise from the identity which he has made for himself or has been made for him by others (Pate, 2017).

Often a person’s identity is formed from a combination of these many different identities. Some individuals have theirs partially decided by society; here the individual must negotiate this identity. For instance, in the poem “My Mother Tells the Story of Her Alabama Childhood” by Elizabeth Gorey, the protagonist is confronted with the opportunity to ignore her true identity or embrace it. Although adolescents are in process of creating their own identity, separate from their parents, they are in a process of push-and-pull between these two often-conflicting identities. Teens often find themselves in conflict with their parents and their cultural identity (Pate, 2017). Erickson comments that adolescents are sometimes morbidly, often curiously preoccupied with what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are themselves (Ramírez, 2017).

Psychology defines two types of identities. Social identity defines the person in terms of belonging groups and personal identity defines the individual. We have so many social identities as we have belonging groups to which we belong. These groups determine our self-esteem. If we define ourselves in relation to groups of high social status, we will have a high self-esteem. However, those who belong to groups with poor status will need other strategies to cope with their low assessment. Personal identity defines the self in terms of social relationships and idiosyncratic features (I am different to other people). What is it that makes us different to the other people in a group? Here our characteristics, attitudes, and skills that we think we have play an important role. Those who define themselves by their sympathy, solidarity or bravery have a bigger personal identity than social identity. This can happen because their belonging groups leave them with a low self-esteem because these groups are of a low social status or because the individuality of these people better express themselves than their social roles (Ramírez, 2017).

Erik Erikson studied with Freud and later developed a stage theory that owed much to Freudian concepts. However, he proposed eight stages. Unlike Freud, Erikson argued that significant personality changes could occur in adulthood, when intimate relationships are first established, when middle age offers continued change or complacency, and when death nears. Two of Erikson’s fruitful concepts for writers are the “identity crisis” and “midlife crisis”. The identity crisis occurs in adolescence and is correlated with people’s search for “who they are” and “how they fit in the world.” It appears to occur only in countries such as the United States, where people do not move directly from childhood into adult roles. American literature, however, has produced many novels using the identity crisis concept. Two examples are J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). A particularly apt evocation occurs in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye (1969), about an eleven-year-old African American girl who wants blue eyes because she thinks only blue eyes are beautiful (Peck, 1997).

First, writers have a personal identity, which influences the perspective from which they write. For example, Margaret Atwood is Canadian; Alice Walker is African American. Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) have similarities because their authors share a gender, but there are also differences between the two works because their authors do not share the same ethnic roots nationality.

Second, writers develop characters who may or may not express their creator’s worldview. In James Sallis’ novels featuring Lew Griffin as the protagonist, writer and character have different identities: Sallis is white, Griffin black. Writers have always expressed their identities in their work, but the development of psychological theories of personality in the twentieth century provided authors with new concepts to explain how identities are shaped. Psychiatrists and psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, and Abraham Maslow put forward theories that altered how modern literature is written and judged. Anyone trying to understand twentieth century literature must also understand these major personality theorists.

Freud’s influence on psychology and on literature and culture was two fold. First, Freud proposed a theory of how human personality develops. Second, Freud created techniques for treating mental illnesses, which, he believed, resulted from difficulties in normal personality formation. Freud’s theory was psychoanalytic theory; his therapy was psychoanalysis. For Freud, human character was determined by complex genetic and environmental forces, the strongest of which exist in the unconscious, a place in the mind seething with biological instincts and physical drives. The unconscious, as its names suggests, is that part of the mind that contains all (memories, desires, thoughts) of which one is not aware. The energy that powers behaviour is the libido, which is inborn and is primarily sexual and aggressive in nature. Society limits how the libido is expressed.

The id contains the instinctual drives and is the only component present from birth, the ego includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions and the superego reflects the internalisation of cultural rules which are usually taught by parents. The superego works in contradiction to the id and strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id just seeks instant self-gratification. In order to understand and analyse Junior’s identities, the concept of identity must first be defined. This is a broad notion which is used in a wide variety of disciplines, including philosophy, mathematics and psychology among others. For the purposes of this paper, the definition used in psychology is of most relevance. For psychologists, identity represents a set of behaviours, emotions, and thought patterns that are unique to an individual. Identity is usually established by late adolescence or early adulthood. Dramatic changes to identity are rare thereafter. Identity is shaped by childhood experience, ethnicity, culture, sexual preferences, religious beliefs and biology. Research shows that people prefer to label themselves, resisting those labels that others have chosen for them. Both positive and negative labels are crucial in the development of personal identity (Peck, 1997).

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian is a novel written by the Native American author Sherman Alexie. It tells the story of a fourteen-year-old teenager called Junior who lives in the Spokane Indian Reservation in the State of Washington. Although he is supposed to spend his entire life there as his parents and most Indians have done, circumstances lead him to leave the reservation to attend Reardan, a school for white people. This represents a big challenge for Junior and ultimately leads him to adopt new social and individual identities. During his time at the new school, he experiences a number of different events which force him to overcome his fears and act differently from how he would have done in the past.. This shapes his changing identities, moulding him into a very different individual from the person which he was expected to be as an Indian.

The main questions which this paper asks are which factors causes Junior to act in this way, why do they have an effect on him but not on others, and how do his identities shift in this process of self-discovery. The answers to these questions help us to understand Junior's character and can be of use in analysing characters in other Native American novels.