Content area
Full Text
Reading Ian Frazier's On the Rez, one might think that no one from the outside world had ever been to the Pine Ridge Reservation and certainly that no one from that place had ever spoken to the outside world before. We arrive with Frazier to a place of myth; a place to which Frazier's boyhood fantasies about playing cowboys and Indians compelled him (Waddington 2) and a place where his later fascination with the militant American Indian Movement, which exploded in the 19705, led him (Frazier 3). Frazier lets the reader know up front that, "This is a book about Indians, particularly the Oglala Sioux who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, in the plains and badlands in the middle of the United States" (Frazier 3).
Frazier himself is a non-Indian who went to Harvard, who writes for the New Yorker, and who his Indian friend Floyd John calls a "wanna-be" (4). Frazier goes on to question, "What's wrong with wanting to be something, anyway? I think Indians dress better than anyone, but I don't want to imitate more than a detail or two.... What I want is just as 'Indian,' just as traditional, but harder to pin down" (4).
The parameters of the book are set up by Frazier right away: he is a nonIndian writing about Indians, who he at least thinks dress well and at most admires. Frazier has a special admiration for the Oglala hero Crazy Horse. "Of course I want to be like Indians," he says, "I've looked up to them all my life" (15). The context of the book, then, is immediately complex. How will Frazier simultaneously avoid and embrace history here? How will he avoid misrepresenting or exploiting Indians and Indian culture in his work when so many others in his position have done just that? As Alexandra Witkin-New Holy says in her review of the book, "Not too long ago, and still today, research on Native peoples has been constructed primarily to benefit Western abstractions, researchers, reader audiences, and institutions" (Witkin-New Holy 1). Spokane author Sherman Alexie agrees: "Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of white men have written books about Indians, and all of those authors surely believed their work to be special, original, even...