On The Rez. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2000 by Christine Gray

ON THE REZ

by Ian Frazier Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.00

IAN FRAZIER'S HIGHLY READABLE, thought-provoking, and often very funny On the Rez begins with a simple, short, declarative sentence. "This book is about Indians" In fact, the book is about something entirely different: Ian Frazier's own selective experience of Indians -- in particular, of a number of Indians he comes to know off, and on, the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

What motivates the book is Frazier's own search for something he believes can be found in Indian society but which white society seems to him unable to produce: the capacity to be personally free.

Frazier ruefully admits he is an "Indian wannabe." He does not want to join traditional Indian religious ceremonies, dance in a sun dance, pray in a sweat lodge, or go on a vision quest with the help of a medicine man. He wants something "just as Indian, just as traditional, but harder to pin down." He wants the apparent self-possessed sense of freedom in Indians that has always captivated white people; he wants to develop the character of the "uncaught" Indian. And the only way to do it is to go to the source.

The leading character is an Oglala-Sioux, Le War Lance, whom we first meet in New York, far from his home on the Pine Ridge reservation. Lance wears bizarre haircuts and even stranger clothes. His mind is constantly creating a personal reality that freely traverses the worlds of fact and imagination. Maintaining his own private frontier with the dominant society, Lance picks up pieces of mainstream culture as he feels, weaving truth and fiction to create one wild and improbable scenario after another.

Frazier can never be sure which of Lance's stories are truth and which are fiction. "For years," he confides," I thought his story about jumping off the Space Needle in Seattle attached by just a Band-Aid to the end of a bungee cord within a promotional stunt for the Johnson & Johnson company might have a grain of truth to it somewhere" It turned out that Frazier was wrong on this one. But other stories only slightly less wild turned out to be true.

The mix of truth and fiction throws Frazier off balance. It throws the reader off balance, too. Lance, we quickly learn, either confounds or transcends the usual assessments made by those of us who live regular lives in white society about who is free and who is not. (The job, the salary, the mortgage or the rent, the car and all those material goodies, enabling, constraining, freeing us up -- but for what?) Always out of cash, often under the influence of alcohol, Lance seems as much at the mercy of events as he does their shaper. Irritatingly irresponsible. Dependent. Yet, still his own person. Carving his own spaces where he can. Is this freedom?

Lance soon returns to the Rez to escape jail. Fate brings Frazier out west too where he continues his quest. But as eloquent and disarmingly honest as he is, Frazier is caught in a trap. He wants to be "uncaught" -- but to find uncaught-ness, it seems, Frazier is compelled to capture it and pin it down.

He convincingly conveys the message that by paying attention to Indians, by becoming more aware of their presence, their values, and what the history of contact with white society has done to them, we can learn about and value what Indians are and have. In doing so, we can learn to be better than we are. We, like Frazier, can seek a new understanding of freedom.

Yet Frazier's friendship with Lance, one senses, is compromised by Frazier's agenda and, in the end, the portrait of Indianness that Frazier offers is just the creation of another set of stereotypes drawn by a white man. Seeking to enlarge his own truncated vision, and ours, too, one feels that Frazier has stuffed a whole people into the shape and size of his own dream of freedom. He meant well. But in meaning well, he stifled the voices he seeks for us to hear.

In this day and age, we have grown used to the idea that ethnic minorities can speak for themselves. The ground between red and white is certainly one that is open for exploration. But Frazier went beyond this to tell us, as he said, about the Indians themselves. One wonders just how much he really does know.

This disturbing aspect of the book -- which is in so many ways a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at the ground between Indians and whites -- is caught in the title. Whether or not Frazier chose it, it misleads. It is unclear just how long Frazier spent on the reservation, or whether he just visited frequently at a time when he lived nearby. Less punchy, less appealing, but much more accurate, it should be called On the Rez Through a Skilled White Reporter's "Wannabe" Eyes.

CHRISTINE GRAY's forthcoming book is titled The Tribal Moment in American Politics.