The most compelling section of the book deals with another hero, SuAnne Big Crow, who died in a car accident in 1992 as a high school senior. For many tribes, life revolved around heroism." Early on, he claims heroism has disappeared from modern culture: "Most everybody wants to be rich, millions want to be famous, but no one today wants to be mistaken for a hero." This attitude, he says, is "profoundly un-Indian. The nature of American heroism is one of Frazier's themes. He has lived a hard life full of fistfights and car wrecks and prison time, and he emerges as a kind of tragic hero by book's end. War Lance, like most of his friends that we meet at Pine Ridge, is an alcoholic. War Lance provides Frazier's port of entry into reservation life and culture. Frazier drinks beer and hangs out with him in New York and later frequently visits him at Pine Ridge. The book makes frequent skips in time and place but is anchored by Frazier's 20-year relationship with Le War Lance, a Lakota man he originally met on the street in New York City. "On the Rez" is as structurally unpredictable as the ill-kept, pothole-filled roads and the harsh, mercurial weather Frazier continually negotiates as he winds around the reservation on wheel and on foot in search of new material. "I have trouble with books that go in a straight line when our world has so many ricochets in it, so many bounces and bends and turns," Frazier once generalized about travel writing.
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