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On the Rez - Hardcover

Frazier, Ian

 
9780374226381: On the Rez
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0374226385 ISBN 13: 9780374226381
Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

Inhaltsangabe


A great writer's journey of exploration in an American place that is both strange and deeply familiar.

In Ian Frazier's bestselling Great Plains, he described meeting a man in New York City named Le War Lance, "an Oglala Sioux Indian from Oglala, South Dakota." In On the Rez, Frazier returns to the plains and focuses on a place at their center-the Pine Ridge Reservation in the prairie and badlands of South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux. Frazier drives around "the rez" with Le War Lance and other Oglalas as they tell stories, visit relatives, go to powwows and rodeos and package stores, and try to find parts to fix one or another of their on-the-verge-of-working cars.

On the Rez considers Indian ideas of freedom and community and equality that are basic to how we view ourselves. Most of all, he examines the Indian idea of heroism-its suffering and its pulse-quickening, public-spirited glory. On the Rez portrays the survival, through toughness and humor, of a great people whose culture has shaped our American identity.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor


Ian Frazier's books include Coyote v. Acme (FSG, 1996), Family (FSG, 1994), Great Plains (FSG, 1989), and Dating Your Mom (FSG, 1986). He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.

Rezensionen

YA-Frazier's book occupies a refreshing middle ground between sentimental worship of everything Native American and a blanket dismissal of all Indians as drunks and layabouts. Some early chapters are about the state of particular tribes today, including statistics; much of this information will be new to most readers. Most of the book is about the Oglala Sioux of the Pine Ridge reservation south of South Dakota's Badlands and about Frazier's long friendship with an Oglala Sioux named Le War Dance. Readers meet Le while he is living in New York City, where his contribution to the narrative seems obscure. Later, though, Frazier visits him on the rez, where he is the entr e to reservation life. In large part, the author observes that the women work while the men drink beer and the ensuing chaos-auto accidents, suicides, etc.-is a sad turnoff to readers. At the same time, Frazier limns the good parts: the businesses that work, and the people who make things run despite daunting odds. Much of the last half of the book is given to the short but generous life of an extraordinary high school basketball star who helped her Indian team win the state championship and whose ideals live on at Pine Ridge. From a concise retelling of how some tribes got into the casino business, or a short treatise on odd Indian names, to a portrait of the American Indian Movement of the '70s, there is something here for anyone interested in current Indian affairs.
Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Following his other road books, the marvelous Great Plains (1989) and Family (1994), Frazier moved his family out West and spent several years exploring South Dakota's Pine Ridge Agency, hoping to enter (as far as "a middle-class white guy" with a ponytail can) the world of the Oglala Sioux. After starting with an uncharacteristic rant about modern American culture, he settles into his quietly observed adventures with friends Le War Lance and Floyd John, whom he fascinatedly and exasperatedly follows (and often drives) around their reservation, where local heroes include Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and a high school basketball star named SuAnne Big Crow. While also making sidetrips into the Lakota language, Wounded Knee, Sioux political history, and the national disappearance of Indian bars, Frazier's broader interest is in the influence of Indian ideas of bravery and human freedom on the American character. His narrative tips at times between writing about his Pine Ridge friends and some Universal Indian, but the story always veers nicely back to specifics on the rez, a landscape "dense with stories." It's the seemingly casual artistry of his descriptionsAof evocative prairie junk, a highway snow squall, a summer powwow in a field full of hoppers, the pure experience of roamingAfrom which Frazier's book gains its resonant strength. Highly recommended for all collections.
-ANathan Ward, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When telling non-Indians that he was writing a book about the American Indian, Frazier (Great Plains, etc.) received a nearly unanimous reaction: that the subject sounds bleak. "Oddly," he says, "it is a word I never heard used by Indians themselves." Frazier builds his narrative--or, more deliberately, unpacks it, since he has no discernable plot, chronology or conclusion--around his 20-year friendship with the Indian Le War Lance and the Oglala Sioux of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. Though no "wannabe" or "buckskinner," Frazier emulates and reveres "the self-possessed sense of freedom" that he claims is the Indian contribution to the American character, adopted by the earliest European settlers and preserved in our system of government. Frazier's record of his travels with Le War Lance includes the tolls of alcohol, fights and car wrecks (Le claims to have survived 11 of them) and acknowledges the realities as well as the clich?s of reservation life. But in his rendering, the calamities of American Indian life are outweighed by the pervasiveness and endurance of that same sense of freedom, a feeling that Frazier captures in his style, his organization, his wonderful eye for detail. Probably no book since Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star has so imaginatively evoked the spirit of the American Indian in American life; like Connell's tours of the Little Bighorn battlefield, Frazier's visits to Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee, and to the descendants of Red Cloud and Black Elk, frame a broad meditation on American history, myth and misconception. Funny and sad, but never bleak, his meandering narrative is, in fact, the composite of many voices and many kinds of history. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Humorist and chronicler Frazier (Coyote v. Acme, 1996, etc.) returns to Indian country for an astute, personal, and disarmingly frank assessment of life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. Reintroducing a figure from Great Plains (1989)Le War Lance, with whom the author has been friends for 20 years Frazier explores his own affinity for the Sioux by relating the curious twists and turns of their friendship. A raconteur of the first rank as well as an alcoholic, Le has roamed from Hollywood to upper Manhattan, but is finally back home on the rez. Since Frazier's own wanderlust has brought him and his family to Missoula, Montana, he often goes to visit Le. Over time, Le introduces his brother and sisters, uncle and aunt, even the graves of his parents and other brothers, endlessly spinning wild yarns that Frazier reproduces without judgment. Elements of tragedy (the girlfriend of Le's brother is killed by a drunk driver) mingle with near-misses (a hose breaks at the distributor, enveloping the family in a cloud of propane gas), but all this is the normal state of affairs at Pine Ridge. As Frazier ponders the history of Indian bars locally and nationwide, or considers the treaty violation that allowed the US government to steal the Black Hills from the Sioux, he also finds resilience in the great-granddaughter of medicine man Black Elk, and hope in the remarkable story of SuAnne Big Crow, a teenage basketball hero who reunited her bitterly divided people by her example, and whose spirit still lives even after her death in a car crash in 1992. Fraziers remarkably thorough and thoroughly eclectic study of one people in one place at a particular moment in time reveals as much about its author as its subject, and as much about ``us'' as ``them.'' (Photos, maps, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Verlag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0374226385
ISBN 13 
9780374226381
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar