The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Indian Education Summary & Analysis

In the first grade, Junior Polatkin, who narrates this story, is bullied, beat up, and called names: Junior Falls Down, Junior Bloody Nose, Junior Cries-Like-a-White-Boy. One day, though, Junior fights back; the “little warrior” inside of him comes to life, and he chants “‘It’s a good day to die’ all the way down to the principal’s office.”

In second grade, Junior is subjected to hatred and cruelty at the hands of Betty Towle, a white missionary teacher who forces Junior to skip recess, to apologize for “everything” though he’s done nothing wrong, and to hold heavy books in his outstretched arms. She gives Junior more difficult spelling tests and, when he passes them, she forces him to eat the paper. She repeatedly calls Junior “Indian” in a pejorative way—“without capitalization”—and Junior replies, “Yes, I am. I am Indian. Indian, I am.”

In the third grade, Junior is caught drawing a “stick Indian taking a piss,” and the art is confiscated. He is sent to stand alone in the corner, and he “faces the wall and [waits] for the punishment to end.” Junior notes, in the present, that he is “still waiting.”

One of Junior’s fourth-grade teachers tells him he should be a doctor, “so [he] can heal people.” Junior recalls that fourth grade was “the year [his] father drank a gallon of vodka a day and the same year [his] mother started two hundred quilts but never finished any.” Junior returns home after school and hears his parents crying in separate rooms. He imagines himself as a doctor and plays in the mirror alone.

In fifth grade, Junior plays basketball “for the first time.” He misses his first shot, but the ball in his hands feels “beautiful” and full of “possibilities.” Meanwhile, Junior’s cousin “sniff[s] rubber cement from a paper bag.” Junior, in the present, ruminates on the “sweet, almost innocent choices Indian boys [are] forced to make.”

In the sixth grade, a new Indian kid from a white neighborhood comes to school. His name is Randy and, within an hour of walking into the reservation school, he gets in a fight and breaks another kid’s nose. Junior says that Randy was his “soon-to-be first and best friend,” who taught him “the most valuable lesson about living in the white world: ‘Always throw the first punch.’”

In seventh grade, Junior kisses a white girl, and feels he is saying “good-byes to [his] entire tribe.” When he opens his eyes, he says, he experiences a vision in which “she was gone from the reservation, and I was gone from the reservation, living in a farm town where a beautiful white girl asked [my] name.” He answers her, and “after that, no one spoke to [him] for another five hundred years.”

In eighth grade, Junior transfers to a junior high school in a white farm town. From the boys’ bathroom, he can hear white girls forcing themselves to vomit in the girls’ bathroom next door. The sound, Junior says, is familiar “after years of listening to [his] father’s hangovers.” On the reservation, Junior stands in line for food with his mother, “happy to have food even the dogs wouldn’t eat.” Junior notes that “there is more than one way to starve.”

In ninth grade, Junior plays a long, tiring basketball game in an overheated gym. Later that night, there is a dance held in that same gym, and Junior passes out at it. His friends “revive” him, and he reveals that later that night “doctors would diagnose [him with] diabetes.” Meanwhile, though, a Chicano teacher approaches Junior and asks him what he’s been drinking. “Indian kids,” the teacher says, “start drinking real young.” Junior learns that “sharing dark skin doesn’t make two men brothers.”

In tenth grade, Junior gets his driver’s license on the same day that one of his neighbors commits suicide by driving his car into a tree. “Everything looks like a noose if you stare at it long enough,” Junior says.

The morning after losing a basketball game for his eleventh-grade team, the Indians, Junior reads the sports page of the local newspaper: “INDIANS LOSE AGAIN,” it says.

Junior graduates from twelfth grade as valedictorian of his “farm town high school,” and has trouble fitting his graduation cap over his hair, which is “longer than it’s ever been.” While people take photographs of him he looks toward the future. Back on the reservation, Junior imagines his former classmates’ graduation: he imagines them “look[ing] back toward tradition.” The tribal newspaper “runs [his] photograph and the photograph of [his] former classmates side by side.”