On the Rez

The reservation, as Junior stated in the book, was made originally to kill Indians. They were death camps in disguise, similar to the "concentration camps" that Jews were put into during the Holocaust, to kill them. However, the reservation might not have killed them physically, but it did figuratively. It really killed their spirits. Doing some research, I found out that the reason Indians have a very bad record of alcoholism is because by being forced onto the reservation, they lose their land: they are treated like savages and slammed into poverty. They drink to escape their pain, to escape shame that has been given to them by Europeans. And drinking really does kill their hopes and dreams (In Part Time Indian, most of the fathers (or mothers) are alcoholics).

There aren't just alcoholics, there are abusive parents, and there are children of those abusive or alcoholic parents that can't go to college because they are too poor, and they become just like their parents. It's a vicious cycle that Indians cannot escape. Junior is a different case: he is trying to escape, trying to build a better future for himself by going to a good school, and he will work hard in his life to avoid the bad path his parents went down and go another way, and we applaud him for that, of course. He has been criticized by his fellow tribe members, when really, they should applaud him for his noble efforts: none of them realize that they have a future that has been robbed from them, which means that they will be forever reading from their parents' textbooks, forever going to powwows and getting drunk, because that's really all they can do. Junior will fly just like Penelope is.