On the Rez

Any family or community has to exist in its own particular landscape and Ian Frazier does a terrific job of making his readers feel at home in the Great Plains landscape. In his book, On the Rez, he takes us deep into some of the most forbidding ground on the Great Plains where we get to know a special community of people who live there."`Bleak' is the word attached in many people's minds to the idea of certain Indian reservations, of which the Oglala's reservation is perhaps the best example," he writes on page one. "Oddly, it is a word I have never heard used by Indians themselves." Current accounts of White despoilment of Indians and their way of life, Frazier writes, "can't do justice to the thrilling spark of freedom in the encounter [between the races]--the freedom the Indians had, the freedom that white people found."In his many visits to the rez, Frazier recognizes something else on the arid hills of southwest South Dakota. "There is greatness here, too, and an ancient glory endures in the dust and the weeds," he tells us. "The way I look it, this is the American bedrock upon which the society outside its borders is only a later addition."With that launch, Frazier goes on to introduce his long-time Oglala Lakota friend he calls Le, short for Leonard Walks Away. Le, a practicing alcoholic, guides Frazier (and us) from the streets of New York, where he and Frazier meet, to the arid high plains where his people live.Frazier remarks that the "reservation is dense with stories," and lets Le tell some of them. "In one of them junk cars lives a guy who I ran into years ago in the Dawes County jail," Le says. He points out another place, "That's where we used to gather sweet grass . . . but the tribe put some new houses back there and the sewage runoff killed it off . . ."In addition to visiting Le, Frazier has done his homework, gathering statistics about reservation Indians. "Especially in western towns that border big reservations, stabbings and fights and car wrecks are a depressingly regular part of life," he writes. "In this part of the country, Indians have an average life expectancy about eleven years shorter than Americans as a whole."He writes of the second Wounded Knee confrontation and the violent division between the American Indian Movement's followers and the so-called "goons" who wanted the occupation to just go away. After the surrender, he tells us, houses caught fire in the night, shots came through car windows, people usually uncomfortable with guns felt they had to carry them . . ."After two FBI agents died during the confrontation, the FBI was suddenly all over the place in search of the killers. The Indians wondered why the "recent deaths of Indians by the dozens hadn't produced a similar response."When Frazier and Le have a near-death experience with a propane bottle, Le just laughs and Frazier gets a little crazy."Well, that's the Indian way," Le says, "we'd rather laugh about still being alive than moan about how we almost died.""So much is wrong on the Pine Ridge," Frazier writes. "There's suffering and poverty and violence and alcoholism, and the aura of unstoppability that repeated misfortunes acquire. Beneath all that is something bigger and darker and harder to look at straight on . . ."Yet, the Indians produce more heroes than the rest of us, Frazier argues, and they're willing to take credit for their bravery. "There's probably more foreign shrapnel walking around the small towns of the reservation than ... in similar towns anywhere in America," he writes. "some Oglala families can give you a genealogy of warriors that begins at Operation Desert Storm and continues back to the Little Bighorn and before."Frazier tells the story of a recent Oglala hero, a young girl named SuAnne Big Crow, devoting several chapters to her. "Great good does exist here, too, in the lives of people who hold fast to it and serve their neighbors without much encouragement or reward, and in the steadfastness of the old Oglala culture that endures."For a glimpse of the lives Pine Ridge Reservation Indians endure, be sure to read Ian Frazier's On the Rez. You'll never think about the Oglala Lakota in the same way again.

This book seems to have drawn more criticism than is perhaps fair, given the author's apparent intent and targeted audience. Readers already steeped in Oglala Sioux history, the history of the American Indian Movement, or that of the Pine Ridge Reservation, may find the book lacking in details and specifics. If you already have an advanced degree in Native American Studies, this book probably is not for you. However, as somebody who has always wondered what goes on farther down those dirt roads than I have ever had the chance to travel, I found this book illuminating. Ian Frazier mentions in the opening paragraphs that when people hear that he is writing about life on the reservation, typically they respond with a variation on how "bleak" it sounds. He goes on to say that "bleak" is a word not used by any of the Indians encountered in the writing of the book. Through reading the book, the reader comes to see that there is far more going on in the life of this community than the bleakness that makes it onto the CBS Evening News every few years, when some new tragedy unfolds.Granted, Frazier at times wanders off topic. His digressions, nonetheless, reveal a certain elements of his character, which added even more intrigue to the book. Not trying to represent himself as a disinterested observer and eschewing the stale objective phrasings of an academic, Frazier's character seems to show through like some sort of mellowed out Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo journalist after a stint in AA, perhaps). His telling of his conflicted relationship with Le War Lance: topic for his book, fitful friend, charity-case/lout-in-need-of-beer-money, brother. The book is part history lesson, part personal memoir, sometime adventure story, at times sweetly saccharin, at times hinting towards an ironic humor that may be more essential than fully revealed. Ultimately, it is readable and it has instilled in me a desire to learn more about American Indian history and modern Indian affairs.

Well written book about life on the poorest Indian reservation in the States