Essay On Smoke Signals And The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian

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“Alcoholism is an epidemic among Native Americans”(KCTS9). Many people believe that alcoholism is in the Native’s blood, but it is truly just a situational problem. On the reservations a majority of families are poverty ridden, and these families normally stay on the reservation their whole lives. Junior, a 14 year old Spokane Indian, manages to break the cycle of hopelessness and alcoholism in his family by leaving the reservation school to go to the white school in the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Another character that Sherman Alexie brings to life, Arnold, is the typical alcoholic indian stereotype who allows alcohol to affect the course of his life in the movie Smoke Signals. In both Smoke Signals and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, author Sherman Alexie shows how alcohol on the reservation can cause accidents, funerals, and heartache.
Nobody is perfect and every person has their fair share of accidents, but in the movie Smoke Signals Victor’s dad, Arnold, makes a mistake that changes his life. On a drunken stumble Arnold shoots a roman candle into Thomas’ parent’s house on Independence Day in 1986. It is an accident that caused by his intoxication, and an …show more content…

More specifically in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Junior talks about the many funerals he has attended in his lifetime. A majority of these funerals he is attending are and effect of alcohol related accidents. His grandma is killed by a drunk driver, Eugene is shot in the face over over one last sip of cheap wine, and his sister is burned alive because she becomes too drunk to save herself. After all of the comparisons that junior has made between white people and indians, he decides that the amount of funerals they have been to is “Really the biggest difference between indians and white people” (Alexi

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