Broken Bridges

Hearing the podcast of “Three Miles” and the way Melanie expresses herself took me back to a book I was reading for class it is called The Absolute True Diary Of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. This story has kinda the same concept of what is going on in the whole podcast. The main character of this book is Junior he is a preteen child who was born inside an Indigenous reservation. His people has always been treated in a inhuman way by society and that led them to live this unhappy where they didn’t believe in the idea of dreaming.

Junior is placed by society in a reservation where there is no way out and no way to
prosper or pursue one’s happiness because the purpose was to see them fail. The reservations, as Junior mentions, is a series of “broken dams and floods” (Alexie, pg.6) and “a poor –ass Spokane Indian Reservation” (Alexie, pg.7). This place that society puts them in made them believe that since they were Indigenous people and the minority that they were nothing, so they believe they were nothing either. Because the Junior and his family followed the rules of not getting out of the reservation and supporting the belief that society implanted on them that they were nothing, they
started to belief:
“But we reservation Indians don’t get to realize our dreams. We don’t get those chances.
Or choices. We are poor. That’s all we are. It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing that you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it”. It sounded like when she noticed that they didn’t have a library at the school in the Bronx “Another thing that was tormented to me was that we didn’t have a library and I love books. Wow we really are in a poor part of the Bronx were we are not being consider”. (21:22)

This quote to me stood out also because it remind me of what Melanie said about how she felt when she walked into that school and saw how it was and she felt “I didn’t belong there. I had no business .. okay this is not free, this is not available for people of color. This is something for only privilege or the elite could have”(25:00).

Furthermore I believe that both this people in a way feel like society has taken something away from them. They have not only oppressed them but they have also made them feel that in worthless and out of place when they arrive in a place that they too deserve. It has also made them both feel that in order for them to make their dreams come true they must step out of their homes and if they do they feel out of place. Like Alexie said “. I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in my loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream”.