But On the Rez is not just the latest litany of horrors visited upon aboriginal Americans. The Navajo, realizing that when you sup with the devil no spoon is long enough, have consistently rejected casinos because of their diminishment of Indian sovereignty. So the states, lusting after this untaxable loot, pressed Congress into passing a law giving them some control over the casinos and forcing Indians to negotiate with them. 'No tribal enterprise in history has succeeded even remotely as well as tribal casinos,' Frazier writes. More recently it has been gambling casinos. Whenever the Indian has something valuable, the government (fronting for commercial interests) steps in to take it away or restrict it. The safe average man would find it tough going to exercise his individual responsibility under those conditions. But Indians have been cheated, lied to, stolen from, defrauded, betrayed, murdered, dispossessed and discriminated against ever since the first Indian-robber stepped upon these shores. Whose fault is this? Each person is responsible for his or her own life, of course. They are especially prone to death in automobile accidents. Murder and other violence, high infant mortality, shorter than average life expectancy, alcoholism, suicide (especially among youth) that reaches epidemic proportions all these and more fill the lives of Oglala Sioux. Whether or not Indians are free, they definitely are not safe. If you've nothing left to lose, hang on to what can't be taken away. When you're poor, badly treated, and lack opportunities, clinging to your roots and to something that makes you special is entirely understandable. Far more than other ethnic groups have,' the Jesuit says.

Or maybe, as the folk song has it, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.įrazier quotes a Jesuit brother (a non-Indian) who works at an Indian school near the reservation: 'It's remarkable, really when you think about it, how much of their tribal culture the Sioux have retained.

Maybe it's that sense of freedom that causes about 100,000 Germans a month, as I recently read elsewhere, to dress up as American Indians and attend gatherings to study the American West and Indian culture. He's not the only one Indians, he says, understand that many visitors to reservations have a vaguely formed wish that they could be Indians. It is the Indian's self-possessed sense of freedom that Frazier says makes him want to be an Indian, in his own peculiar way. The average man is not an American Indian, however, and the American Indian, I must conclude after reading On the Rez, Ian Frazier's book about the Oglala Sioux of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, is not the average man. 'He simply wants to be safe.' The Sage of Baltimore, so irritatingly right in so many things, is probably also right in this. 'The average man doesn't want to be free,' H.L.

On the Rez by Ian Frazier