On the Rez. (Teaching Notes).

By Ian Frazier. New York: Picador, $14.

My second-semester honors Freshman English class was multiethnic, multire-ligious, multicultural--about half of them American-born. Several of them were proud of their historical knowledge, but only Wanda, whose Native American grandmother regularly took her to pow-wows on Long Island, knew anything beyond stereotypes about our native peoples.

Angelo, a student my age (in his early forties), and a disabled veteran, was the most vocal. "To tell you how ignorant I was: I served in this country's armed forces for most of my adult life, and I didn't know there was any Indians in there with me. Reading this book, reading that book of Native American speeches, reading Last of the Mohicans, it makes me think it was wrong not to know! My own father, I was telling him about this book, and he told me, 'Hey, you're Indian too. You didn't know that?' 'Pops,' I said, 'how could I know if you didn't tell me?' 'You're Puerto Rican!' he says. 'Where'd you get that color in your skin? You never heard of the Taino?' And so, when I'm not reading for this class or my other classes or working, I'm reading about my people, Professor. I was ignorant, and now I'm not, and it just makes me wonder at how we can be so ignorant of things so close to us."

I swear, at least once a week, Angelo would address us at this length, and I always enjoyed it and felt grateful. His classmates, most of them teenagers, sometimes rolled their eyes. Good students though they were, they weren't interested in revelations from an older classmate. Even so, I think his candid remarks helped them strive to be candid as well.

On the Rez focuses on the history and present-day life of the Oglala Sioux of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, but what became for us the center of the book and our discussions is Frazier's friendship with Le War Lance, who figured so memorably in Frazier's Great Plains.

He calls me every few weeks, it seems, to ask for money. It's good that he does, I suppose, to keep me from getting sentimental when I think of him. Even now I can feel my words want to pull him in a wrong direction, toward a portrait that is rose-tinted and larger than life, while he is pulling the other way, toward reality... Once when I said I had no money to send, La became angry and told me he would not be seeing me again, that he expected soon to die. Then he told me to "suck on a banana and make it real," and hung up. I didn't hear from him for a year or more after that, and I began to worry that maybe he actually had died...

"Are they really friends?" asks earnest Joseph.

"Why not?"

"Because Frazier's always buying. They go get beer, and Frazier doesn't even want La to have beer, and he buys it.

"I don't got a problem with that, Professor," says Angelo, "because I know friendships are just like any other relationship. They're unequal. I don't have equal relationships with my children. I learned you got to take each relationship on an individual basis." Joseph protests, "Shouldn't friends be friends on an equal basis? Isn't that what friendship is?"

"Should be or is?"

"But if friends aren't equal, there's always a struggle!"

"That's what he's saying," says Angelo. "The writer, Frazier, he's showing it like it is, nor like you want it."

This unequal friendship troubled us because we didn't see our ideals of friendship illustrated, but how all of our relationships strain with imbalance. For the first time in a writing class, I found essays on friendship interesting.

Frazier's sense of humor leavens his troubling reflections on the roles evil and envy play in the terribly sad history of the Sioux, in particular, and Native Americans in general. The evil is the political and social history, the poverty, the drug abuse, and the envy is just envy.

The other important relationship for Frazier in the book is with someone he never met, but only discovered through his research on the reservation: SuAnne Big Crow. She was a wonderful high school basketball star who brought Pine Ridge a glorious state championship. She died in 1992 in a car crash at the age of seventeen.

When SuAnne talked about the reservation, people recall, she sometimes used the metaphor of the basket of crabs. It's a common metaphor on Pine Ridge. She said that the reservation is like a bunch of crabs reaching and struggling to get out of the bottom of a basket, and whenever one of them manages to get a hold and pull himself up the side, the other crabs in their reaching and struggling grab him and pull him back down. The metaphor could apply, no doubt, to many places nearly as poor and lacking in opportunity as Pine Ridge.

Some of my students attested to the truth of this metaphor back where they came from, but what makes this image resonate so powerfully in On the Rez is that La is one of those who tries to pull SuAnne back down. "My interest in SuAnne, when I mentioned it to him," writes Frazier, "seemed to make him morose and sour." And then, one day, La badmouths her, scrawling across the portrait Frazier had mentally painted of her, leaving Frazier "depressed." Frazier soon runs into Le's "source" for the slander and discovers that La, apparently out of jealousy and envy, made it up. And there we had another big pothole on the road of friendship to discuss.