Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern that is
suitable for printing. (1.5MB b&w photo)
NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
April 6, 2000
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©2000 Plains Folk
It's what's now being called a "road book" in notices and on dust-jacket blurbs. It used to be called a "travel narrative." This type of writing is the specialty of Ian Frazier, author of "Great Plains" in 1989 and now (new from Farrar, Straus and Giroux) "On the Rez." Despite his frequent bylines in The New Yorker and his current residence in Princeton, N.J., Frazier loves to write about the Great Plains.
This sort of thing--commentary on their home country by an articulate easterner passing through--makes people on the plains wince. As a plainsperson I get exasperated with Frazier now and then, because he's irreverent to the point of smart-alecky, and after a while you wonder whether he's really invested in anything. Then again, he's spent some considerable time in the region, by choice. And if you give him time, he comes through with some insights and stories that regional insiders might not see or focus on.
That's what happens in "On the Rez." The subject of the book is Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Frazier's entre to Lakota life on the Rez is Le War Lance, an interesting and thoroughly unreliable informant, and from there he follows his nose through whatever aspect of life on the Rez piques his interest.
For about half of this book I was restless and disgruntled. There was too much Frazier and not enough Pine Ridge. Then there was a believe-it-or-not section of amazing trivia about any Indians anywhere--wait a minute, wasn't this book supposed to be about Pine Ridge? And when the book did get around to the Rez, it was not so much about the Rez as about what a middle-aged white guy might want to talk about on the Rez.
There are breakthroughs, and you can feel them coming. Drinking gets extended attention, along with car wrecks, but finally the narrative arrives in White Clay, the decrepit town in Nebraska that is the bottle shop for Pine Ridge--and there Frazier confronts, he says, pure evil.
Using that word, "evil," is one of the breakthroughs. Frazier expresses his exasperation with journalists and commentators who keep speaking of reservation life as "bleak." That word implies fate, a situation that is as it is and has to be so; whereas, using "evil"--well that implies willfulness, doing wrong on purpose. When Frazier finally says that the liquor trade in White Clay, and other problems on the Rez, are the result of evil, that's when I want to shake his hand. He's committed to something!
I'm still undecided about the book when I plow into the section devoted to SuAnne Big Crow, but a few pages into that section I realize that the book is saved. Just telling the story of SuAnne Big Crow is worth the effort. She was--is--a hero.
SuAnne Big Crow was a heck of a basketball player. In the 1989 Class A state tournament in Sioux Falls she scored 36 points in the first round and 28 in the semifinals. She was slowed down by Milbank in the finals, but in the end she was the money player who hit the buzzer-beater and delivered the state title to Pine Ridge. Nevertheless, she was better known for the night she silenced and then won over a hostile crowd in Lead by draping her warm-up jacket over her shoulders and performing a Lakota shawl dance at center court.
That was leadership, by a high school sophomore. And she used her local celebrity as a platform to deliver an anti-drug, anti-alcohol message to peers. Her youthful death in an auto accident, before she had the chance to take up the college scholarships proffered her, leaves her a hero frozen in time, pure.
The Rez is not a bleak place, not neutral gray. There is evil there, and there is good. Which is to say, people live there.
###
Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern that is
suitable for printing.
(1.5MB b&w photo)
Click here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern wearing a
hat that is suitable for printing. (1.3MB b&w photo)