Word: rez
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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...
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...