Gotta Get out of Here

Remsen 1

I would have to say Junior did not grow up under the best conditions. When you're one of the smartest kids in the school and your teacher tells you quote"you have to leave the reservation"unquote, you really have to sit back and look at your life and where its headed. Along with a teacher telling him to leave, the poor kid has only one friend on the reservation. I believe Junior had no choice but to leave and pursue his dreams. If only everyone could get the kind of advice he received from that teacher, I bet the world would have a lot more happy people.

Growing up in Anchorage from eighth grade on, I think I would have gone the wrong way with my life if I hadn't gotten out when I did. By the end of high school approximately ninety percent of my friends were doing drugs, many of them were into pot and cocaine. After graduating from high school, I worked in the construction field, insulating houses. Most companies of this type pay piece work, the more you get done the more you make. At this time in my life, it was like the commercial, the more coke you do, the more you get done, the more you make, the more coke you could buy. I was very fortunate to get out of there when I did, several of my old friends have since passed away from living an extremely hard life. But like Junior, I did not want that life and here I am.

Thoughts about a part-time white kid.

Growing up as the youngest kid in a family of five, keeping a diary was out of the question, at the very least I would have been ridiculed, probably beaten up. Much as Junior was. There is one major difference, it would have been my own brothers doing the beating. Boys growing up out in the country as I did, just did not keep a diary, sort of an oath. Now that I'm older and I hope wiser, I wish I had kept a diary, nay, a journal, so that I could remember all of the fun I had as a kid and with who. Most of the names have slipped now. I believe that Sherman Alexi kept a diary for that exact reason, to keep track of his memories, good, bad or indifferent.

I happen to have a most deluxe lifeboat for getting through life. When any little problem arises, all I have to do is talk to my wife and it seems as if life gets better with each word. I can be having an issue with an item and it can be as simple as her walking in the room, and voila, I've got a solution. Does anyone believe in mind melding. Since meeting my wife there have been dozens of times when we spout the exact same thought at the same moment. Weird I know. But it works for us.

I love when Mr. P tells Junior "If you stay on this rez, they're going to kill you. I'm going to kill you. We're all going to kill you. You can't fight us forever. I love the fact that a teacher is sitting down and telling a student the truth so straight forward. On so many reservations you can see kids that are pretty much just wasting away, not caring about anything because nothing or nobody cares about them. I've been through several reservation from Washington to Minnesota and it seems as if they are all very similar.