In On the Rez, Ian Frazier invites us to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, just a few miles east of the Sioux's original Black Hills land. "I'd done the book about the Great Plains," he told me before his reading, "but I wanted to focus on a more specific part." Toward that end, Frazier immerses us in Pine Ridge's contemporary community - in Wounded Knee, the American Indian Movement, alcoholism, car wrecks, children, and, finally, hope. Along the way, we meet dozens of residents; foremost among them are Frazier's friend, Le War Lance, a nomadic storyteller Frazier has known for twenty years, and SuAnne Big Crow, the fourteen year old girl whose heroic example helped bring long-feuding factions of the reservation together.

A former staff writer at The New Yorker and Harvard's Lampoon, Frazier is the author of five previous books. We talked about heroes past and present, and about life on and off the rez.

We talked about storytelling, too. "Words are charms," he explained. "You want to know what happened. I want people to know how much they are made by the Native American culture that preceded them and how powerful it is in America. It's like a song you don't even know you know."
 

On the Rez by Ian Frazier List Price $15.00 Your Price: $5.95 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies Great Plains by Ian Frazier Your Price: $14.00 (New - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies Coyote V. Acme by Ian Frazier List Price $10 Your Price: $3.98 (Sale - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies Family by Ian Frazier Your Price: $5.00 (Used - Hardcover) More about this book/ check for other copies Dating Your Mom by Ian Frazier Your Price: $5.00 (Used - Trade Paper) More about this book/ check for other copies

Read an excerpt from On the Rez.

Dave: How long were you in Montana this time?

Ian Frazier: Four years.

Dave: Did you go specifically to write this book?

Frazier: That was one of the reasons. I've also been working for some years on a book about Siberia. My theory on going to Missoula was that it would be easy and interesting to go to Siberia - I could fly to Seattle, and with one change of plane, fly into the Russian far east - and then also to go back east to Pine Ridge. It seemed well-suited for both books, well-situated. And we know people in Missoula. I figured I'd be gone a lot, but my family wouldn't be miserable while I was gone. It wouldn't be like living out in the woods last time we lived in Montana. It's a nice town.

Dave: Missoula must have seemed almost urban compared to Pine Ridge.

Frazier: It wasn't as different as the east. Western towns have a lot in common. People in Missoula, and I think in other western towns, just talk a lot more about Indian issues. They're in the newspaper, questions about land use and sovereignty. It wasn't as far from Pine Ridge as the distance would make it seem. Also, the Flathead Indian Reservation is just north of Missoula, so people there know about the subject.

Dave: William Least Heat-Moon was here recently, and that function of westward movement was clear in his book. He's traveling coast to coast in a boat, and when he starts up the Missouri River, Native American issues suddenly rise to the crest of the story.

Frazier: Most Indians live west of the Mississippi. It's the result of being pushed west, for the most part.

Dave: How did you come to ground the narrative in your friendship with Le War Lance?

Frazier: He and I had known each other for a long time. He'd told me about Pine Ridge, and I'd done the book about the Great Plains, but I wanted to focus on a more specific part. By coincidence, really, he ended up going back to Pine Ridge shortly before I was ready to move.

I had a number of things that I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the question of freedom and the question of heroes. I try to do things according to the circumstances of my life, the way you cook according to what's in season. I try to use what's there. I saw in our friendship a way of talking about bigger questions.

Dave: You go on at length in the book about heroism. Well, yesterday in Portland, a serial rapist escaped from a courtroom just a few minutes after pleading guilty to a series of violent crimes that could put him in jail for more than 40 years. He literally just ran out and got away. Later in the day, he was sighted at a train station downtown - apparently, he had a recognizable tattoo on his hand. Basically, three guys watched him, followed him, and wound up chasing him down and tackling him at a station west of the city. They held him until the police arrived.

In the newspaper, the police said, "It's rare to have citizens stop a felon like that - it's not something we recommend - but in this case, we are glad it worked out." And the hero's statement was predictably dismissive, almost verbatim to your description in On the Rez of what modern-day American heroes always say: "It's just me. Somebody had to do it."

[Note: The three men have since been showered with praise, and Saturday's Oregonian (February 26, 2000) reported that some very generous donations from anonymous parties have increased their cash reward to nearly $20,000.]

Frazier: A copy editor at FSG [Farrar, Straus and Giroux] wrote in the margin at that point of the book, Maybe this is just people being modest. That it makes you even more heroic to be modest.

But I think what is different is that Indians recognized when they did heroic things. The society recognized it, but the individual recognized it, too. There are ledger books, pictographic accounts - autobiographies, really - of some 19th century Native American warriors, and they're just filled with one heroic deed after another.

But it's not encouraged now. Just the way the police say, "Well, we don't encourage this sort of reaction." Why not?! So you might get killed, but that's up to you. It's your choice. Maybe if they did encourage people to do it, there'd be less criminals.

And the hero's disclaimer is in every newspaper story. I start reading and try to guess which paragraph it will come.

Dave: It made me wonder if it's just self-fulfilling. As soon as I picked the story up, I knew it was coming. He probably knew he had to say he wasn't special because that's what the hero has said in every story he's ever read.

Frazier: It's as if the culture is now saying, "Don't be a hero, and if you are, don't admit it."

I once caught a guy breaking into the apartment below mine in New York City. The neighbors had had the radio on, and suddenly it was off. I called them and they didn't answer, which was peculiar. So I walked down the fire escape and all their stuff was stacked out there on the landing, and there were panes of glass missing from their back window. I realized the guy was still inside. I called the police, and they came, and I said, "The guy is in there." The guy hopped over to the next building and ran, so I showed the cop where he was going to come out - there was only one way out, the way he'd run - and the cop caught him. I felt this unbelievable rush. It was incredible. I was so high.

I think if I was that guy you're talking about, I would have said, "I risked my life! I caught a criminal!" It's such an astonishing thing to do.

Dave: I read the section [of On the Rez] about SuAnne Big Crow before I met some friends for dinner on Tuesday. In the book, you call her act "one of the coolest and bravest deeds I ever heard of." I had to tell my friends the story. I just had to tell someone. You know, "You're not going to believe what this girl did!"

SuAnne was a very humble person, though. She doesn't fit your description of a traditional boastful, proud Indian hero.

Frazier: Right. What's funny, though, is that at that level, her legend was created by her tribe.

Native American society places an enormous emphasis on heroism and an enormous emphasis on equality. Those are such strongly conflicting forces that they can tear people apart.

Indian leader, one after the next, did some great thing, then, somehow, he wasn't like everyone else. And yet you were supposed to be like everyone else. I think it created terrible confusion for Crazy Horse, for Red Cloud, and for Spotted Tail, just among the Sioux. How are you this extraordinary person and still a member of the tribe?

And that may also be what you're seeing in "I'm not a hero." For SuAnne, it wasn't like she got to capture one criminal and it was over. She had to be a hero over and over, all the time, and she was just a kid.

Dave: Was there any inclination on your part to make SuAnne more of a focal point of the book? She doesn't appear until fairly late in the story.

Frazier: I think to understand what she did you have to first understand how difficult this life is, the life at Pine Ridge. And secondly, you have to understand Wounded Knee, which was a very important historical force that shaped her and people's perceptions of her.

Her family supported the tribal faction that was heavily involved in tribal government, they supported the tribal chairman, and they were opposed to AIM (the American Indian Movement). But she was also very much beloved by people who'd come from the AIM side of things.

In SuAnne, people found something that they had in common.

I could have made the whole book about SuAnne, I could have made it a book for young adults about SuAnne, but somehow to see the whole weight of what she did, to understand what it meant to do that dance and lead, you had to know all that had come before. And I think in some instinctive way, she really did understand it.

That was the moment in the book where I could have some hope. I felt strongly driven to find something hopeful.

Dave: You quote a Supreme Court ruling about the government taking Black Hills land from the Sioux. The Justice flat out says it was one of the worst things our government has ever done.

"In 1946, the government established the Indian Claims Commission specifically to provide payment for wrongly taken Indian lands, and in 1950 the Sioux filed a claim for the Black Hills with the ICC. After almost twenty-five years of historical research and esoteric legal back-and-forth, the ICC finally ruled that the Sioux were entitled to a payment of $17.5 million plus interest for the taking of the Hills. Further legal maneuvering ensued. In 1980 the Supreme Court affirmed the ruling and awarded the Sioux a total of $106 million. Justice Harry Blackmum, for the majority, wrote: 'A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history' - which was to say officially, and finally, that the Black Hills had been stolen.

. . . The eight [Sioux] tribes involved decided unanimously not to accept the money. They said, 'The Black Hills are not for sale.'"

Frazier: When you're part of a tribe, a huge part of your identity precedes you. I'm fascinated with history, with the past, and to see what a huge burden it can be - it carries you along like a pebble on a glacier. When Le says, "I'll pay you when I get my Black Hills money," a hundred and twenty-five years of catastrophe is coloring that sentence.

And yet, we can think about giving the Black Hills back.

The arguments against slavery were always bumping up against this: "But it's an institution that's been around forever! What would happen if we got rid of it? How would you pay the people who lost their slaves, their valuable property? How would we harvest? It's not practical. What would we do?"

Lincoln's great moment was saying, "I don't care if it's destructive. Slavery is wrong."

You start with, "Is it right or wrong?" Then you act on that judgment. You don't say, "I'm not going to say it's wrong because it would be too impractical to undo." We agree that taking the Black Hills was wrong. Now, what do we do about it? Not just, "We're going to give them some money," because that doesn't take care of it. It's not dealing with the right and wrong of it.

Many reviewers have said, "Well, that's never going to happen." That's very easy to say. I like to think of What's the more difficult thing to say?

If you know what's right and wrong, you proceed from that, but as I say, many people would consider that just mad. But in terms of hope, to say that a wrong can be righted - there's hope there.

Dave: Obviously, you were an outsider at Pine Ridge. Not only are you not from there, but you're not Indian. You were friends with Le, but you talk to a lot of people in the course of writing the book. After a while, was it less of an issue? Was it ever an issue?

Frazier: There was a time when I understood a little better how to talk to people. And I understood that people weren't going to come out right away and tell me everything. It took many visits, many return visits, before they saw that I was serious.

In other kinds of reporting situations, you come in and say, "Here, I have some questions," as we're doing now, and the person will answer them. There, the person would either just not show up or drift away or be involved in something else like changing the baby's diaper - but they would just kind of disregard me.

Some people, the first time, spoke with me. Doni De Cory, for example. Others, I'd been there five or six times, and then we'd just be sitting. With one of SuAnne's sisters, I was sitting on the deck outside the SuAnne Big Crow Center, and she just suddenly talked to me. I'd seen her a bunch before. Yet it was full of exactly what I was trying to get, but if I'd gone in and said, "What was your childhood like?" I don't think it would have come out that way.

Most people were friendly, especially if the subject was SuAnne. They knew, I think, how strongly I felt about her and how much I cared, and they cared, too, so we had something we could talk about. I thank SuAnne, wherever she is, for that. She always provided things to help people cross barriers, and she helped me.

I called Dennis Banks [the co-founder of AIM], and he didn't even say he was Dennis Banks when he picked up the phone. I said, "Well, I want to talk to him about SuAnne." And he said, "Oh, okay," and we talked for forty minutes! At the end, I said, "I want to ask a couple questions about Wounded Knee." I know if I'd asked that at the beginning I wouldn't have got an answer; I mean, he wouldn't even admit it was him on the phone! I don't think I ever would have talked to him.

Dave: You wrote Great Plains before this, so On the Rez is hardly out of left field. But to certain audiences, you're known as a humorist. You've covered a lot of ground.

Reading the opening piece of Coyote V. Acme, "The Last Segment," it took a while before I understood exactly what you were doing. I wasn't prepared for it, coming straight from On the Rez.

It's funny as hell. It's fantastic. Were you writing this type of humor piece while you were working on this book? Do you take breaks, go back and forth?

Frazier: Actually, most of those I wrote while I was writing Family . But I don't see such a big difference. The piece you're talking about is about how narrative just carries you along, you just go with it - and that's very much what Le does. He lives for narrative. You're charmed, you want to know what happens, and that's the point: words are charms.

Coyote V. Acme, it's completely theoretical, in a way. There may be a couple essays in there with a genuine first-person, but mostly it's just the words themselves. The author is not the point at all.

But they are two different forms, in some ways quite different, and I can't really explain why I do both.

I don't write so many humor pieces. I published a humor collection in 1985. I published another in 1995 or '96. But when I have the desire to do something, it very often comes out like On the Rez.

Dave: What kind of stuff have you been reading? Or, maybe I should ask what you've been enjoying.

Frazier: I read a lot of nonfiction. History. And I've been reading Russian authors. Right now I'm reading [Aleksandr] Pushkin, who I think is one of the coolest guys in the world.

Dave: Does this have to do with the Siberia book? Are you working on that now?

Frazier: Yes, I'm hoping to start on that very soon.

Dave: Is it nonfiction also?

Frazier: Yes, nonfiction, and probably Travel. Travels in Siberia - that genre is very strong from the nineteenth century and even before. There are all kinds of books about it. I like to write about places, I really do.

Dave: You do a really good job of presenting the oversimplified history of Native Americans and throwing it in the reader's face: Here it is, the story everyone's been telling you for however many years.

Frazier: I want people to know how much they are made by the Native American culture that preceded them, and how powerful it is in America. It's like a song you don't even know you know.

For my Siberia book, I'll write about these guys from the town of Kotzebue in northern Alaska who went across the Bering Straight on snow machines, and drove all over the Chukotski Peninsula on snow machines, to convert Quakers, Eskimo Quakers. This was just a few years ago. They had to get lifted across because the Strait wasn't completely frozen, but they were lifted in by helicopter, and they drove two thousand miles in their snow machines in the bleakest, most out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere Siberia, going to these villages and preaching. It's just the most incredible journey.

Well, I have a Russian friend, and I wanted her to see this. The guys had sent me a cassette of their trip, a video they'd made. It's phenomenal.

You see these Eskimos getting all geared up, starting the snow machines, packing all their gas and all the stuff they're going to take, a whole sled full of Bibles and all sorts of equipment.

They're firing up their machines outside their houses in Kotzebue, and everything is white; it's the middle of winter. They get the machines idling, and they go back inside to eat breakfast. One of the guys is eating his eggs while, off camera, someone is talking on the phone. The guy looks up at the clock, swallows, and says to the person talking on the phone, "Tell 'em we're gonna leave in. . . just about twenty minutes," and he goes right back to eating.

My Russian friend looks at that and says, "Real American guys."

Now, of course, that looked just as American as John Wayne. You know, "Thumbs up! Here we go!" It's that moment from a movie: "We're goin', man!" Yet, to me, I was thinking, Look at those Eskimos.

But when she said that, of course, I realized, no, we're all Americans, and it's a different thing to be. What we have in common with native people and with each other is much greater than we think.

In the book, in On the Rez, I wanted to point out what we have that's different, but how below that, we know many of the same things. We have a huge amount in common.

I met Ian Frazier upstairs in the Annex prior to his appearance in the Basil Hallward Gallery at the City of Books on February 17, 2000. Frazier was among the first to greet a crowd in our new, expanded reading space - also, among the first to fill the room to overflowing. Every chair was occupied. Fans clustered on the edges of the seating, in the nooks alongside bookshelves, and around the information desk to hear him read from On the Rez.

In the days following the online publication of this interview, we received dozens of letters admonishing me for not revealing the specifics of SuAnne's heroic act. If you've read this far, you may share that frustration. What exactly did SuAnne do that was so special? Well, I didn't ruin the surprise before, and I'm not going to ruin it now. Ha!

I agree with Frazier on this one. To appreciate SuAnne's story, you have to understand its context. And, hey, that's what the book's for.