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ON THE REZ; By Ian Frazier; Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 320 pp., $25.

When I first heard the title of Ian Frazier's "On the Rez," his nonfiction study of the brief time he spent on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, I laughed out loud. A white man using the word "rez" to describe the reservation is the equivalent of a white man using the word "hood" to describe a black inner-city neighborhood. It implies a degree of cultural familiarity that is very rare.

In his role as journalist, tourist and friend to a few Oglalas, Frazier may have earned the right to call the reservation "the rez," but that would only be in the company of those Oglalas who call him friend. When used as the title of the book, Frazier's formal use of "the rez" marks him as an outsider eager to portray himself as an insider, as a writer with a supposedly original story to tell and as a white man who is magically unlike all other white men in his relationship to American Indians.

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 definitive. Frazier certainly displays plenty of self-confidence by beginning his book with this simple declarative sentence: "This book is 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." Notice that Frazier's opening gambit doesn't include possessives or qualifiers. He carefully avoids the more accurate description of his book: "This is Ian Frazier's book containing his ideas and opinions of the Oglala culture, particularly the idea of heroism and public service and its vague influence on the larger American culture." He neglects to mention that his ideas and opinions were formed by his relationships with just a handful of Oglalas and by an unspecified number of visits to the reservation. How much time did Frazier spend on the reservation? I cannot tell you. He is vague about that subject for reasons I don't quite understand.

This is an excerpt from the book review. The complete text of this review is archived with the Los Angeles Times.

Original publication: Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2000


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