Cultural outsiders who write young adult fiction tend

5. Cultural outsiders who write young adult fiction tend to romanticize the impoverishment of Indians. Junior is
having none of this: "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. Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons
about perserverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor." How does Junior's direct language
address this stereotypical portrayal of Indians? What about his language draws the teen reader into the realities
of his life?
6. Junior's parents, Rowdy's father, and others in their community are addicted to alcohol, and Junior's white
"friend with potential," Penelope, has bulimia. "There are all kinds of addicts, I guess" he says. "We all have
pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away." Compared to the characters in Jon Hassler's young
adult novel, Jemmy (Antheneum, 1980), how does Junior's understanding of addiction trancend ethnicity and
class?
7. Junior refers to his home reservation as "the rez," a familiar name for the place he was born, the places his
friends and relatives for many generations back were born and are buried, and the land to which he is tied that,
no matter how bad things get, will now and forever be called "home." What would Junior think of a cultural
outsider, such as Ian Frazier, who visits a reservation to gather material for a book and then calls his book "On
the Rez"?

8. At Junior's grandmother's funeral, Junior's mother publicly gives a white billionaire his comeuppance to the
delight of the whole community. "And then my mother started laughing," Junior says. "And that set us all off. It
was the most glorious noise I've ever heard. And I realized that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and
displaced and crazy and mean but, dang, we knew how to laugh. When it comes to death, we know that
laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. And so, laughing and crying, we said goodbye to my
grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said goodbye to all of them. Each funeral
was a funeral for all of us. We lived and died together." How does this reflect a cultural insider's perspective and
how does it disrupt stereotypes about stoic Indians?