Description
Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian is based on his own experiences growing up. Like Junior, Alexie switched school’s after seeing his mother’s name written in a textbook and realized the inequity between his reservation school and the “white” school 20 miles away. Many of your reading questions this week focus on Junior’s struggle with conflicting lives or identities. This conflict is similar to what we talked about last week in terms of Treuer’s concept of the borderland. Take your definition of borderland from last week’s discussion post and use it to describe Junior’s struggle between two cultures. Cite at least one specific example in Alexie’s novel that you feel best illustrates the idea of the borderland. Your post must consist of at least one fully developed paragraph
Explanation & Answer
Attached.
Running head: ALEXIE AND TREUER'S BORDERLAND
Alexie and Treuer's Borderland
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliations
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ALEXIE AND TREUER'S BORDERLAND
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Alexie and Treuer's Borderland
Treuer (2012) suggests that borderland conveys a conflict of cultural stability and cultural
gap in an interactional zone where identity is shaped and restructured among people who claim
indigeneity and others who do not. His life in the reservation was filled with racial tension, and
upon joining Princeton University, he expected his classmates to demonstrate racial sensitivity.
However, he continued to experience the same challenges, and thus, he realized the borderland
still followed him. Similarly, Junior (Arnold), a Native American teenager in Sherman Alexie’s
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian experiences the struggles between two cultures
when he leaves the Spokane Indian Reservation to join a “white” school at Reardan. Junior’s
decision to leave the reservation is because of the awareness of the stagnancy and immobility
promoted by conditions in the reservation (Alexie, 2007). He is aware that No Indian in the
reservation has gone to college and the environment is affected by social problems such ...
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