Word: frazier
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Great Plains (1989) Ian Frazier transformed himself from a supremely hip New Yorker humorist into a serious but never somber chronicler of the American heartland. In On the Rez (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 311 pages; $25) Frazier entertainingly continues this investigation, although his interest is now concentrated on a specific patch of the wide-open spaces, the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux. Why this place and these people? While researching Great Plains, Frazier met and became friends with Le War Lance, a Sioux man with colorful if not always credible stories...
...that, Frazier admits, was not the only reason he made all those arduous treks. "I am a middle-aged non-Indian who wears his hair in a thinning ponytail copied originally from the traditional-style long hair of the leaders of the American Indian Movement of the 1970s because I thought it looked cool." Lance's brother teasingly calls Frazier a "wannabe" Indian, and the author doesn't protest much. "Walking on Pine Ridge, I feel as if I am in actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we're gone...
This attitude may sound like the prelude to a very romantic look at American Indian life. It is not. Frazier treats the people he meets "on the rez" with respect, but he is aware of the problems many of them bring on themselves. There is, for example, their tendency to drink and then drive and be killed in car wrecks. "As I approached the reservation," Frazier writes of his first visit, "I imagined I could feel the life expectancy drop, as palpable as a sudden drop in temperature...
...Frazier serendipitously shuttles his narrative between Pine Ridge visits and snippets of Indian history, a fascinating picture emerges of a people struggling with the consequences of old wrongs and human orneriness. He remains alert to signs of hope and finds one in the story of the late SuAnne Big Crow, a high-school basketball star whose exploits and character united the reservation in pride. Like her ancestors, Big Crow lives on in legend...