#sherman alexie
“There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away.”
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
“If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child can look at it and say, ‘that’s a flower.’ So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.”
-Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Velma: You two guys got your passports?
Thomas:Passports?
Velma: Yeah! You’re leavin’ the rez and goin’ into a whole different country, cousin.
Thomas: But it’s the United States.
Lucy: Damn right, it is! That’s as foreign as it gets. Hope you two got your vaccinations!
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Thomas: Durin’ the ‘60s, Arnold Joseph was the perfect hippie because all the hippies were tryin’ to be Indians anyway. But because of that, he was always wonderin’ how anybody would know when an Indian was tryin’ to make a social statement. But there’s proof, you know. Back durin’ the Vietnam War, he was demonstratin’ against it and there was this photographer there. He took a picture of Arnold that day, and it made it onto the wire services and was reprinted in newspapers throughout the country. It even made it to the cover of Time magazine! In that photograph, Arnold is wearin’ bell-bottoms and a flowered shirt, his hair in braids, with red peace symbols splashed across his face like war paint! He holds a rifle above his head, captured in that moment just before he proceeded to beat the shit out of the National Guard private lyin’ on the ground beneath him. Another demonstrator holds a sign, just barely visible over his left shoulder. It reads: “Make love, not war”.
Lucy: Geez. Did your dad really do that?
Victor: Thomas, you’re so full of shit.
Lucy: Oh, then what happened?
Thomas: Arnold got arrested, you know. But he got lucky. At first they charged him with attempted murder but then they plea-bargained that down to assault with a deadly weapon. And then they plea-bargained that down to bein’ an Indian in the twentieth century. Then he got two years in Walla Walla.
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