ON THE REZ.

• Author: Gray, Christine
• Position: Review

ON THE REZ

by Ian Frazier Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.00

IAN FRAZIER'S HIGHLY READABLE, thought-provoking, and often very funny On the Rez begins with a simple, short, declarative sentence. "This book is about Indians" In fact, the book is about something entirely different: Ian Frazier's own selective experience of Indians -- in particular, of a number of Indians he comes to know off, and on, the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

What motivates the book is Frazier's own search for something he believes can be found in Indian society but which white society seems to him unable to produce: the capacity to be personally free.

Frazier ruefully admits he is an "Indian wannabe." He does not want to join traditional Indian religious ceremonies, dance in a sun dance, pray in a sweat lodge, or go on a vision quest with the help of a medicine man. He wants something "just as Indian, just as traditional, but harder to pin down." He wants the apparent self-possessed sense of freedom in Indians that has always captivated white people; he wants to develop the character of the "uncaught" Indian. And the only way to do it is to go to the source.

The leading character is an Oglala-Sioux, Le War Lance, whom we first meet in New York, far from his home on the Pine Ridge reservation. Lance wears bizarre haircuts and even stranger clothes. His mind is constantly creating a personal reality that freely traverses the worlds of fact and imagination. Maintaining his own private frontier with the dominant society, Lance picks up pieces of mainstream culture as he feels, weaving truth and fiction to create one wild and improbable scenario after another.

Frazier can never be sure which of Lance's stories are truth and which are fiction. "For years," he confides," I thought his story about jumping off the Space Needle in Seattle attached by just a Band-Aid to the end of a bungee cord within a promotional stunt for the Johnson & Johnson company might have a grain of truth to it somewhere" It turned out that Frazier was wrong on this one. But other stories only slightly less wild turned out to be true.

The mix of truth and fiction throws Frazier off balance. It throws the reader off balance, too. Lance, we quickly learn, either confounds or transcends the usual assessments made by those of us who live regular lives in white society about who is free and who is not. (The job, the salary, the mortgage or the rent, the car and all those material goodies, enabling...