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highlowbuffalo's review against another edition
3.0
“Education and economic empowerment were available to Lena [an Indigenous girl] but the only way to achieve them was to leave behind her culture… having to choose between development or culture was a choice someone outside the culture had thought up. A choice that someone who didn’t have to leave her culture to thrive would present. Stick ‘em up- your culture or your future.”
The concept of An Indian Among Los Indigenas is fantastic- what it’s like to be an Indigenous person who volunteers to help out another group of Indigenous peoples. I highlighted passage after passage. This book made me think hard about what it means to be Indigenous. It made me dig deep into the intentions behind helping others. I have come to the conclusion that there’s a great difference between saving and supporting.
“The real beneficiaries of service work were the service workers themselves”
Though the idea behind the memoir is compelling and the story is enjoyable, I wasn’t satisfied by it as a whole. I found it hard to respect the thoughts and actions of the narrator. She seems very self-absorbed and self-righteous. (Though it also seems that she intended to only show this side of herself, maybe to align with the purpose of the book.) But I appreciate multi-faceted characters. I wish we could’ve seen more into her honest thoughts and feelings and what was going on in her life. Also, without giving any spoilers, I’ll say there were many seemingly significant events that were either glazed over or alluded to later. It’s as if she experienced a whole different journey than the one she took us on. This is also due to a lack of narrated thoughts and feelings. Overall, the story just didn’t seem fully developed. Or rather, the objective of telling this story overshadowed the actual story itself.
The concept of An Indian Among Los Indigenas is fantastic- what it’s like to be an Indigenous person who volunteers to help out another group of Indigenous peoples. I highlighted passage after passage. This book made me think hard about what it means to be Indigenous. It made me dig deep into the intentions behind helping others. I have come to the conclusion that there’s a great difference between saving and supporting.
“The real beneficiaries of service work were the service workers themselves”
Though the idea behind the memoir is compelling and the story is enjoyable, I wasn’t satisfied by it as a whole. I found it hard to respect the thoughts and actions of the narrator. She seems very self-absorbed and self-righteous. (Though it also seems that she intended to only show this side of herself, maybe to align with the purpose of the book.) But I appreciate multi-faceted characters. I wish we could’ve seen more into her honest thoughts and feelings and what was going on in her life. Also, without giving any spoilers, I’ll say there were many seemingly significant events that were either glazed over or alluded to later. It’s as if she experienced a whole different journey than the one she took us on. This is also due to a lack of narrated thoughts and feelings. Overall, the story just didn’t seem fully developed. Or rather, the objective of telling this story overshadowed the actual story itself.
funky_frogster's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
3.75
abbydee's review
I always wanted a little more from this book. Pike frequently hits nails on heads, articulating uncomfortable truths in the simplest possible way, but I’m still hungry for something more than a rewrite of her Peace Corps journals. A little broader consciousness, some fruit of the thirty years since her trip to Bolivia and the opportunity to contextualize that experience with hindsight. But she seems more interested in re-creating her own naivete and wrong-footedness. These are banal emotions for travelers, because everyone comes from a culture and feels a little awkward and exhausted outside of it. Though I must say Pike does an impressively, spectacularly bad job navigating the Bolivian small-town small town. Or maybe a good job having a memorable experience in a place she knew she could leave without consequences. Pike acknowledges her own confusion, sometimes poorly navigated, and the strange, double-edged virtues of the Peace Corps tour of duty. She is frank about what she wanted from this experience and the way her expectations changed while she was in South America. But the lens still feels very zoomed on a dramatic, isolated dalliance in her life, and I wonder what broadening that perspective might lend to the telling.
lesbrary's review against another edition
I discuss this on April 6th's All the Books episode! Here are two quotations that stuck out to me:
"My identity was a tailless donkey they had to pin the right kind of brown."
"I was ashamed of everything that I did and said. I wished I had stayed in my room tonight and every night so as not to embarrass myself. I hated feeling that way. Yet I also loved the world and people. I didn’t know how to be in the world and not feel ashamed."
"My identity was a tailless donkey they had to pin the right kind of brown."
"I was ashamed of everything that I did and said. I wished I had stayed in my room tonight and every night so as not to embarrass myself. I hated feeling that way. Yet I also loved the world and people. I didn’t know how to be in the world and not feel ashamed."
k8linthegr8's review against another edition
adventurous
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5