![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() This shorthand also makes Pine Ridge gloss into any Indian reservation. ![]() So, since Frazier apparently has earned the right to use the lingo of the reservation in the title, he passes that right to his reader, assuming that we, too, seek a baptism of our own Native American nostalgia. The title of the book indicates a hip informality and familiarity with things Indian: the "Rez." In our contemporary fetish for memoir, we want our writers to be familiar and to treat us as one of them. His stance toward his subject seems accidentally postmodern: He knows a problematic nostalgia for some pure American Indian past drives both apologies and condemnations of American history, but he proceeds to elevate the past as beautiful and tragic and the future as inevitably triumphant: "Walking in Pine Ridge, I feel as if I'm in actual America, the original version that was here before and will still be here after we're gone." Yet as he romanticizes, he also trivializes. But, as Frazier focuses on the Pine Ridge Reservation and the Oglala Sioux who live there, it's unclear how aware he is that he writes headfirst into this tradition. Ian Frazier's On the Rez fits into a tradition of Americans "going native" that goes back at least to Frank Hamilton Cushing's account of joining the Zuni in the 1890s, The Mythic World of the Zuni. ![]()
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