Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: ‘On the Rez,’ an insightful peek into the reservation

Friday, Jan. 21, 2000 | 9:52 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

Bleak. Proud. Those are the reigning cliches of white America's understanding of contemporary Indians, "bleak" being our nutshell conception of reservation life, "proud" our description of the Indians themselves, a way of distilling all we think we know about what they've suffered since Columbus barged in uninvited.

"On the Rez" (Farrar Straus Giroux, $25) is writer Ian Frazier's attempt to get beyond the easy words, to offer up a fully rounded depiction of reservation life, specifically as lived by the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation.

Did I mention that Frazier is white -- he used to write for the New Yorker; you can't get much whiter than that -- and that he frankly admires his subjects? "Of course I want to be like Indians," he admits early on, recalling his youthful fascination with the Oglala chief Crazy Horse. "I've looked up to them all my life." Can you already hear the Kevin Costner voice-over?

So our first order of business, before we begin to assess how well Frazier has done his job, is to wonder if he should be doing it at all. Remember Spike Lee's argument that only a black director could make a proper movie about Malcolm X? In our era of identity politics, sensitivity training and multicultural correctness, such a question is inevitable.

It can't be answered, of course, except on a case-by-case basis. In this case, Frazier provides an eloquent, deeply felt rebuttal to Lee's concerns about cultural imperialism: Yes, a white guy can write well about Indians, if he's open, honest, generous and not given to easy over-sentimentalizing.

"On the Rez" begins with a personalized overview of European-Indian history. Contrary to prevailing pieties, Frazier doesn't dwell at great length on the bad juju that explorers brought to America -- the disease thing, the greed thing. He discourses on what European culture received from native Americans: their fierce egalitarianism and sense of individual freedom. That is, the amino acids of America. Taken to the courts of Europe, Indians didn't bow to heads of state, but addressed them informally. "Thanks to Indians," Frazier asserts -- perhaps oversimplifying things a bit -- "we learned we didn't have to kneel to George III."

Although he carefully weaves history throughout his book, Frazier isn't a historian, he's a popular writer, and so the narrative soon gets down to its real purpose: depicting life in modern Pine Ridge. He is not a mere tourist taking notes; he visits the reservation frequently, getting to know many of the residents, who seem to see him for what he is -- a guy genuinely interested in their lives, with no judgmental agenda.

His main foil is a man named Le War Lance: convicted criminal, drinker of many beers, teller of tall tales (some of which happen to be true -- he does know Elliott Gould), infuriating man, absolute charmer. In his company, Frazier visits Wounded Knee, site of an 1890 massacre of Indians and a 1973 uprising of militant Sioux, both of which have reverberations in latter-day Pine Ridge.

In the second half of the book the show is stolen by a girl named SuAnne Big Crow. She's an outstanding high-school basketball player for the Pine Ridge school, a holder of several state records. Frazier first becomes intrigued by her after hearing about an act of courage: At a hostile (non-Indian) high school, where the fans roared mocking, racist chants, SuAnne strode alone to the middle of the gym and performed a traditional Oglala shawl dance. It not only quieted the crowd, it ultimately had them cheering for her.

As charted by Frazier, SuAnne's athletic exploits and generous spirit helped in some ways to unite a reservation divided by internal conflicts and ancient jealousies. "Here was a hero -- not a folk hero, a sports hero, a tribal hero or an American hero, but a combination of all of these," he writes.

So thoroughly and convincingly does he render SuAnne's life and impact on her people that when she dies in a car accident, your sadness is palpable.

Frazier doesn't give into sticky, easy, "Dances With Wolves"-style romanticizing; he catalogues the reservation's poverty, violent politics, pervasive alcoholism, shattered infrastructure and the ghosts of its haunted, massacred, land-stolen, broken-treatied past. The conclusion he arrives at is chilling: "Beneath it all, there is something bigger and darker and harder to look at straight on. The only word for it, I'm afraid, is evil."

But that doesn't dim his frank fondness for the people he's met, a fondness that, by book's end, feels entirely earned, not simply adopted.

Write what you know is perhaps the most damaging advice foisted on writers, encouraging them to remain safely within their own airspace. Better to turn it around: Know what you write. "On the Rez" -- written after numerous journeys to Pine Ridge and a deep immersion into its culture -- is a first-rate example of that principle in action.

Footnotes

February marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the New Yorker. It's being marked by a flood of books, largely memoirs by writers associated with it or accounts of its history. The one getting the most attention is "Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker," a memoir by former staff writer Renata Adler.

In it, Adler attempts to describe the decline and fall of the once-great institution. A magazine of that name still comes out weekly, but it's not what it was.

As she goes about trying to figure out who or what killed it, Adler settles scores with a raft of the magazine's regulars, most particularly, William Shawn --object of her professed affection even as she goes for his jugular. It's delicious for a while, but the grim spectacle of Adler bringing up one person after another, only to cut them down to size, wearies after a while.

Perhaps those still interested in the magazine's history should turn instead to "Life Stories," a collection of the magazine's best profiles -- it might be a reminder of why anyone cared in the first place.