By Byungkwan Park
“Just so you know, I got here because of rage,” said Sherman Alexie, an award-winning Native American writer and occasional comedian, in a half-serious, half-facetious manner at the Statler Auditorium in his Friday evening lecture, “The Partially True Story of the True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”
Alexie’s first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian won the 2007 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. The lecture, which was based on this novel, presented an overview of the author’s childhood and development as a writer.
Alexie frequently elicited laughter from the nearly 600-person audience as he often joked about the many tragedies of his younger years.
As a six-month-old baby, Alexie needed brain surgery due to an abnormal accumulation of water in his brain, a condition called hydrocephalus. Although he survived the surgery, he suffered seizure throughout his childhood. The sickness, however, was only one part of Alexie’s rough childhood.
“I was sick, very sick, and very poor on top of that … Even your food was constantly reminding you of how poor you were,” Alexie said.
Alexie grew up eating food provided by the government with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. Partly as a result of the reservation’s impoverishment, Alexie developed a rather bitter outlook on life as an adolescent.
According to Alexie, he was dehumanized constantly as a poor, disabled Native American.
“I personally hate any philosophy that dehumanizes human beings,” Alexie said.
“You don’t live like that and not collect pounds and pounds of rage,” he added.
Alexie pointed to the audience to address and belittle existing Native American stereotypes.
“You thought you were the ones colonized,” Alexie said sarcastically. “I wish we were the people that you think we are, and I wish you were the people in the Declaration of Independence.”
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