On the Rez (review)

On the Rez by Ian Frazier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

I write this review with a variety of questions brewing inside of my head as to what position and stance to expose toward a bunch of words bound together on pages of a book that sells for $25. I am torn between the poles of my anthropologically and academically trained mind to my Oglala human heart. I do not know Ian Frazier, but I do know the culture and space he writes about.

It is not just a place to visit for me, but the place where a people began and continue to exist within the world Frazier admittedly chastises. He writes, "The Oglala Sioux reservation, actively or otherwise, continues to resist the modern American paving machine" (15). The Pine Ridge Reservation is what it is; inclusive of physical and cultural beauty, while at the same time overshadowed by violence, poverty, alcoholism, intertribal feuding, suicide, and confusion. Frazier does a good job of documenting his observations in a first-person narrative without injecting an objective lens that claims to understand what Frazier regards as most non-Indians' sentiment toward contemporary Indians: "Why can't they get with the program?" Most Americans have a hard time understanding why Indian people remain together on reservations and don't become like other Americans (i.e., succumbing to the melting pot notion).

My first reaction to the book, before reading it, was polluted by the reality of writers who appropriate others' experiences for their own benefit (i.e., the history of Indian and non-Indian interaction and books published about Indians purporting to be pro-Indian). My overly schooled and highly cynical attitude immediately wanted to say, "Does some of this $25 I am paying go to the Oglala Sioux Tribe?" Yet, these personal opinions I hold do manifest themselves throughout Frazier's book. However, his romantic searching of Indian people for an answer to the reasons and roots of his societal dissatisfaction seem to elude his extended quest for knowledge.

Frazier is direct and honest in his approach to the complexity involved in writing about American Indian peoples. The following passage demonstrates his humility regarding the whole issue:

I see my friend Floyd John walking across it the other way, I stop, and he comes over to the car and leans in the window and smiles a big-toothed grin and says, "How ya' doin', wannabe?" I kind of resent the term "wannabe" (what's wrong with wanting to be something, anyway?), but in my case there's truth to it. I don't want to participate in traditional Indian religious ceremonies--dance in a sun dance or pray in a sweat lodge or go on a vision quest with the help of a medicine man. The power of these ceremonies has an appeal, but I'm content with what little religion I already have. . . . I don't want to be adopted into a tribe, be wrapped in a star quilt and given a new name, honor though that would be. I don't want to stand in the dimness under the shelter at the powwow grounds in a group around the circle of men beating the drums and singing ancient songs, and lose myself in that moment when all the breaths and all the heartbeats become one. What I want is just as "Indian," just as traditional, but harder to pin down. (3-4)

This searching is the impetus of the whole book, which Frazier anchors in two concepts that implicitly make Indians so unique and magnetizing to him--freedom and heroism.

Frazier writes, "Of course I want to be like Indians. I've always looked up to them all my life. When I was a young man my number-one hero was the Oglala leader Crazy Horse." The irony of Frazier's admiration of Crazy Horse and many other Oglala leaders he connects to freedom and heroism...