Escaping the rez

Homes on Spokane Reservation

Washington contains 29 Indian reservations.  They range in size from the giant (over 2.1 million acres) Colville Indian Reservation in the northeastern corner of the state, down to the 13.49 acre Jamestown S'Klallam Indian Reservation on the Olympic peninsula.

A couple of reservations have, at present, no population -- including the Cowlitz Reservation near my hometown.   

And yet, the average Washington resident may go for years -- or a lifetime -- without ever knowingly entering a reservation.  Except, perhaps, to stop at a roadside stand to buy fireworks. 

These thoughts occur to me because I'm half way through a book* about an Indian teenager -- recommended to me by a Facebook friend -- who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation.  The semi-autobiographical novel is classified as Young Adult fiction, and the boy's narration is often funny.  But his background is appalling in its poverty -- poverty both in physical amenities and in the mental and emotional lives of his family and of other Indians living "on the Rez."  Alcoholism is almost universal, and the alcohol leads to cruelty, child abuse, fighting, and lethargy. 

The boy, a bit of a misfit from birth, inspired by an elderly teacher's words, tells his parents he wants to leave school on the Rez and attend school in Reardan, a town just off the eastern border of the reservation.  His parents don't object, but he becomes the object of hatred from everyone else.  He has betrayed his tribe.  He's going white.

The kid is obviously smart -- smarter than most of the students at Reardan which is -- in the book and in reality -- an above average high school, especially for a town of only 571 population (the school draws from a wider area than just Reardan itself).  He has the expected problems in finding acceptance from an overwhelmingly white student body.

But what impresses -- and depresses -- me is the other part of his problem.  The rejection, the hatred he faces each night when he travels the some 20 miles back to his home on the reservation.  Life on an Indian reservation -- at least in this book -- is beyond dysfunctional.  It's pathological.  It's a life led without hope, without ambition, without the simple joys of family and friends one usually finds in even poor societies.  It's a life of hating oneself and one's ethnicity, of total belief in one's own inferiority, and a resentment of anyone who dares to stand out.  It's a life where drunkenness is life's only real solace.

I realize this is a work of fiction (although based on the author's own childhood).  And even if based on familiarity with the Spokane reservation, it's about life on only one reservation.  One shouldn't generalize.  And yet, I can't help the suspicion that America's experiment with "managing" its Indian tribes on reservations has been badly mismanaged for generations.
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*Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)