Frazier has a wonderful sense of detail, and he uncovers much of the Pine Ridge life. Not only does he make clear his intended audience (people unfamiliar with Native America), he also makes clear why we need heroes: The terrible task of everyday life requires greater guidance than that found at Home Depot.īeyond these generalizations, though, the book has rich material worth mining. It is also profoundly un-Indian.' According to Frazier, heroes are still to be found on the Pine Ridge Reservation, as seen in the large number of war veterans there, and in particular, one excellent child athlete. 'This recent change in our psychology is baffling to me. Frazier broadly uses the royal 'we' to explore popular opinion of American Indians and reaches the conclusion that most Americans are in need of heroes: 'Most everybody wants to be rich, millions want to be famous, but no one today wants to be mistaken for a hero,' Frazier writes. In Chapter One, he continues his rapture on Crazy Horse begun so eloquently in his bestseller Great Plains, but he explains that when his wife wanted to remodel their home, he asked himself, in earnest, 'Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?' This infatuation seems juvenile and extreme. Though he has a fondness for the Oglala ('In the same way that I have gotten used to my liking for hot sauce or my aversion to crowds, I accept that my affections veer toward the Oglala Sioux'), it is as if any 'rez' will do.įrazier's romantic notions are couched in innocence, and he seems to think his readers will appreciate this. This shorthand also makes Pine Ridge gloss into any Indian reservation.

So, since Frazier apparently has earned the right to use the lingo of the reservation in the title, he passes that right to his reader, assuming that we, too, seek a baptism of our own Native American nostalgia. The title of the book indicates a hip informality and familiarity with things Indian: the 'Rez.' In our contemporary fetish for memoir, we want our writers to be familiar and to treat us as one of them. His stance toward his subject seems accidentally postmodern: He knows a problematic nostalgia for some pure American Indian past drives both apologies and condemnations of American history, but he proceeds to elevate the past as beautiful and tragic and the future as inevitably triumphant: 'Walking in Pine Ridge, I feel as if I'm in actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we're gone.' Yet as he romanticizes, he also trivializes. But, as Frazier focuses on the Pine Ridge Reservation and the Oglala Sioux who live there, it's unclear how aware he is that he writes headfirst into this tradition.

Ian Frazier's On the Rez fits into a tradition of Americans 'going native' that goes back at least to Frank Hamilton Cushing's account of joining the Zuni in the 1890s, The Mythic World of the Zuni.

On the Rez by Ian Frazier