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On the Rez
by Ian Frazier
The Hidden Lives of Indians
A review by Adrienne Miller
SURFACE: On the Rez explores a world few Americans know — or care — anything about. Ian Frazier returns to the West, which he wrote about in his splendid 1989 book Great Plains, and sheds light onto the hidden lives of the Oglala Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The star of On the Rez is SuAnn Big Crow, an incredible basketball player, local celebrity, and Oglala hero. She died in a car accident when she was eighteen, and, years later, she's been beatified by the Oglala. Those who never met her talk about her as if they knew her.
GUTS: Despite the off-puttingness of the title and the stereotyped associations of its subject matter ("the elements that usually evoke the description 'bleak,'" writes Frazier), On the Rez is both compassionate and alarming. It's a primer, first of all, on Native American history and custom ("The previous generation or two of pop culture left the impression that most Indians in recent years had names like Running Bear or Little White Dove or Running Water. In fact, Indians had and have names [like]...Toby Shot to Pieces ... and Montgomery Ward Two Belly..."), but it's funny, too. Frazier, in case you don't know, is one of the funniest writers around. But he's also a skilled reporter and researcher. An important and absorbing book, characterized by its wit, heart and pathos.
SAMPLE SENTENCE: "Imagine that the hopeful, innocent, unbounded fantasy you had about someone you really admired when you were a child did not meet the usual puncturing and deflation but simply continued to grow; that you kept it with the same innocence and hope, finding more justification for it every day; that the person you admired, someone as familiar to you as yourself and yet at the same time set apart...."
Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor.
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