On the way to Amin’s, there’s this Free Little Library that always catches my eye. Last week I stopped by on the most inconvenient of days it seemed like. It was raining and the sun had already gone down.

Holding up my phone’s flashlight, I scanned the available books; it was full this time around, filled to the brim. A title caught my attention, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and seemed to be something I would like. I took the book and made my way back to the car.

It wasn’t until I got home that I realized the book was by Sherman Alexie, one of my favorite authors. I shrieked with joy. Last year, I read The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven (Lone Ranger) after a local bookseller recommended it to me—I had just finished reading Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya and was looking for a book that referred to mysticism or Native American spiritualism. Lone Ranger was an option they gave me.

They’re all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I’m the last, the very last, and I’m sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot.

I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash the water across my bare skin. And dance. I’ll dance a Ghost Dance. I’ll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it’s my grandfather and my grandmother singing. Can you hear them?

I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls.

I’m growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor.

We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ship falls off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way (Lone Ranger, 16-17).

Alexie has a way of making light of pain and poverty, making you laugh at something you don’t want to laugh at, but you do it anyway. His words are painfully, humorously true.

I wish I were magical, but I am really just a poor-ass reservation kid living with his poor-ass family on the poor-ass Spokane Indian Reservation….

And sure, sometimes my family misses a meal, and sleep is the only thing we have for dinner, but I know that, sooner or later, my parents will come bursting through the door with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Original Recipe.

And hey, in a weird way, being hungry makes food tase better. There is no thing better than a chicken leg when you haven’t eaten for (approximately) eighteen-and-a-half hours. And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.

God knows I am grateful for Sherman Alexie. Well, at least Amin knows I am grateful for Sherman Alexie. If it weren’t for Alexie and other writers of his caliber, how would we ever know what really goes on in an Indian Reservation? How would we ever know how they feel?