Contemporary American Indian History

Joe and Junior Come of Age on the Reservation

“I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.”—Joe Coutts, The Round House³⁵

“Just take a look at the world. Almost all of the rich and famous brown people are artists. They’re singers and actors and writers and dancers and directors and poets. So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation.”—Junior (Arnold) Spirit, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time  Indian³⁶

There is nothing more important or fascinating to teenagers than themselves. They are obsessed with the minutiae of their lives. Both The Round House and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian are coming-of-age novels of young boys struggling with identity and adulthood, and each has a decision to make that—we assume—will change the trajectory of his life after we have read the last page. Each novel tells a compelling story of reservation life, from the point of view of Joe Coutts in The Round House and of Junior Spirit in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The similarities and the differences in each of their stories provide us rich material for analysis and exploration of the themes of culture, identity, and how language influences our perceptions of others. The opening chapters of both novels are excellent examples.

In The Round House, we meet 13-year-old Joe. He and his father are removing “small trees [that] had attacked [his] parents’ house at the foundation.”³⁷ We get the sense from his description—the “rusted old dandelion fork with a splintered handle” and “a long slim iron fireplace poker”³⁸—that this is a summer ritual for them. We learn quickly, too, that Joe comes from a family of relative privilege. When his father takes a break from their task, Joe sneaks into his father’s, a tribal judge, study and peruses a well-worn and heavily-annotated copy of Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law, one we assume was handed down from Joe’s grandfather to his father, and which Joe will one day inherit along with a library of “books with amber pages and dry leather binding” and filled with “inscriptions.”³⁹

He is not what we expect of a boy who just two weeks before was twelve years old—not his vocabulary nor his sentence structure. Once he stops prying trees from the foundation of the house, he finds a book to read rather than go off to meet friends. And the book he reads is no comic. Rather, he spends his time

parsing out the idea [in a court case that] established in other cases and reinforced in this one, that [Indian] treaties with the government were like treaties with foreign nations. That the grandeur and power [his grandfather] talked about wasn’t entirely lost, as it was, …, still protected by law.⁴⁰

He feels comfortable enough to tackle a difficult text, something he had obviously done before because he “was trying to get used to the old-fashioned language and constant footnotes,”⁴¹ and mature enough to understand that with such a complex text it would take time. He is a young man who comes from a long line of “tedious Coutts,” all of them “responsible, upright, even offhandedly heroic men who drank quietly, smoked an occasional cigar, drove a sensible car, and only showed their mettle by marrying smarter women.”⁴² He knows he is expected to follow in their footsteps; however, Joe has other plans. “I saw myself as different, though I didn’t know why yet.” He is a young man confident in his future, even though he is not sure what it will look like.

Though they are about the same age, Junior, Alexie’s protagonist, is no Joe. Junior begins his story with his birth:  “I was born with water on the brain,” and then confesses, “Okay, so that’s not exactly true.”⁴³ The conversational language and rhythm of Junior’s speech is quite different from Joe’s reflective, mature narration. Where the imagery in the first few pages of The Round House implies a sense of order and comfort without excess, we are confronted in Junior’s narration with discomfort because of excess. He had “too much cerebral spinal fluid,” or “brain grease [that] got all thick and muddy and disgusting, and [that] mucked up the works.”⁴⁴ He had too many teeth—forty-two, which was [t]en more than usual. Ten more than normal. Ten teeth past human.”⁴⁵ And he had a big head, big hands, and big feet, a “size eleven in third grade!”⁴⁶

Although the novels’ protagonists may seem to lead disparate lives, they have some commonalities, besides their age and that they both live on reservations. Both live in two-parent households. Both have extended families in close proximity. Both have a circle of friends, some who are not as lucky as Joe or Junior to have families that clearly love them.

Erdrich and Alexie, each in their own way, are making statements about reservations and the people who live there. Rather than places that Alexie describes as “place[s] where we were supposed to be concentrated and die and disappear,”⁴⁷ we see through the eyes of these young narrators both the beauty and struggle present in daily life. Despite the differences in style, both authors are asserting control over the narrative of what constitutes reservation life. They reveal what life is like in the “in-between” as “an Indigenous immigrant,”⁴⁸ that duality of existence that comes with being American Indian. They are controlling the language of their stories, what Gloria Bird described succinctly:  “One of the functions of language is to construct our world. We are the producers of this world who create ourselves as well as our social reality, and we do this through language.”⁴⁹

It is this struggle, this challenge, that makes these two novels excellent reads for this unit. The parallel settings, this “in-between,” help us to see the complexity of life on the reservation. In Erdrich’s vision, we see a place where customs and traditions thrive alongside the trappings of contemporary life, where the past and the present are not mutually exclusive, where honoring one does not require rejection of the other. In The Round House, the reservation is a sanctuary where culture is maintained and honored, relatively safe from a dominant white culture that seeks to consume Native cultures. But it is also a place of insurgency, where quiet and sustained resistance to political forces that seek to eradicate Native peoples and culture is part of every day life. For Joe, the reservation shelters and nourishes him. He knows that, his desire for independence notwithstanding, no matter where he goes, he has a home and a place that will welcome him, a place and a people to whom he belongs. It is the violation of this sacred place, as represented by the Round House, that shatters Joe’s innocence and eventually causes him to act in ways that will change forever his life, his perception of the world and his place in it.

Alexie’s reservation, too, is one where cultural traditions survive. However, despite the humor, his vision of reservation life is more bleak. It is populated with, as Mr. P tells Junior, the defeated: 

All these kids have given up.... All your friends. All the bullies. And their mothers and fathers have given up, too. And their grandparent gave up and their grandparents before them. And me and every other teacher here. We’re all defeated.⁵⁰

Without much deliberation, Junior accepts this characterization of the reservation as a place devoid of hope and embraces Mr. P.’s admonition that Junior must leave it for a place where people still have hope. Junior must escape if he wants a chance at a better life. Indeed, as he tells his best friend Rowdy, his life depends on leaving the reservation:  “I have to go. I’m going to die if I don’t leave.”⁵¹ Unlike the sanctuary of Joe’s world in The Round House, where the characters stay because it is a place that nurtures them, Junior and his sister leave, with Mary “running away to get lost” and Junior running “because [he] want[s] to find something” [emphasis in original].⁵²

These two visions of reservation life, embodied in the protagonists of each novel, leave readers unsettled. Though both narratives conclude, we are unsure about how the decisions these young men make and the actions they will take will affect them. This uncertainty in the futures of Joe and Junior is symbolic of the uncertainty that surround the issue of Native American sovereignty and self-determination, too often subject to the whims of voices which wield political power at the time.

What students will learn from reading these two different yet similar novels is the way in which the authors use language to portray the same situation differently. Erdrich and Alexie do what Janice Gould states that writing does:  “I think of writing as a way to make questions, ponder, meditate, dream and locate powerful truths that may enrich the imagination and deepen our desire to affirm life,”⁵³ asserting the power to define and redefine identity and culture and what it means to be American Indian. Students will see in the lives and experiences of these two protagonists “mirrors” of themselves, “recognizing, ‘Oh wait a second—this person and I have a common journey.’”⁵⁴