My favorite aspect of this book was Junior finding an identity for himself. Throughout the book, we see him struggling with different aspects of his life, trying to make them fit into a paradigm of Indianness or Whiteness. He struggles to hide the poverty of his Indian life from his white friends. He struggles to hide his nerdiness from other Indians. But eventually, he begins to see that he can't just be a part of himself when he's around others. By the end of the book, he realizes that he's a part of many different clubs, and that the complexity of his identity is what makes him himself.
It's a way of reaching beyond the dichotomies of race, class, or anything else. To me, it's also a very non-Western way of looking at Identity. Too often, we have to be classified as one thing and one thing only. Right now, we are students or teachers or 20-somethings, but really, we are all of those things at once. When we give up or hide a part of ourselves from others, we are really giving up all of our selves to the pressures of the outside world. But, as Sherman Alexie makes clear, that will never help us understand or fulfill our desires for our life.
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I love the idea of having more than one identity and agree that this notion is unlike the typical notion of western society. It seems like society forces individuals to choose an identity and stick to it. I know most of us are going to be teachers and during clinicals it seems like a struggle to decide if we are teachers or students, when in fact we are both. This thought almost makes me uncomfortable and anxious because it seems like society tells us that we have to act and decide now. Like you said, it seems Sherman Alexia is trying to tell us that the best way to live life is to be true to yourself. Putting on false airs like Junior does between each culture, can be a burden. I think that this novel is so appealing to readers of all different backgrounds because it is an issue that everyone can relate to. Therefore, it sort of "humanizes" American Indians.
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