Native American Identity in Euroamerican Academic Structure in Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Abstract

Text is the confluence of multiple social relations that take place in the context of available resources and constitute the identity of the participants under sociocultural rules. In Native American context, the available resources have been distributed and adjusted in the favor of the whites. To counter this hegemonic arrangement, Sherman Alexie's fiction imaginatively develops the situations in which the relationships of the Native Americans among themselves and with the Whites are readjusted through redistribution of social resources. Native American presence in the whitewashed contemporaneity of America forms intercontextuality seeking re-placement and re-situatedness of the Native subject in the active flow of the social life of today’s multi-ethnic, multi-cultural US society. The school serves as a structure where academic practices are conducted according to Euroamerican norms of signification, and resources of allocation and authorization. This article explores how Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian shows the Native American subject performing prescribed socio-cultural functions in interaction with the whites in the academic environment of two schools, first at the Reservation school and then at the white school in Reardan.