The word most commonly used to describe American Indian reservations is "bleak," a term supported by statistics on income (30.9% of Indians live below the poverty line) and mortality (their death rate from alcoholism is roughly four times the national average). But as much as it willingly concedes these problems, Ian Frazier's passionate and convincing On The Rez is committed to telling a story in which Native Americans' resilience and independent spirit are just as evident. Frazier, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, sees the personification of the modern Indian in Le War Lance, an Oglala Sioux he first encountered on a New York City street and described in his 1989 book Great Plains. Though their friendship is marred by Lance's tendency to borrow money and spin tall tales when he's been drinking (which is too often), Frazier is awed by his powerful sense of personal freedom and group identity. With Lance cast as a tour guide, On The Rez chronicles life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, taking casual excursions through the arid expanse of land with a few slow days reserved to work on broken-down cars and the occasional jaunt to the dreaded White Clay, Nebraska, the closest town that sells alcohol. With his flat, no-nonsense prose and frequent digressions into important historical anecdotes, Frazier demands a lot of patience from his readers. He admits as much when he sets up the story of an inspiring Oglala hero named SuAnne Big Crow, a high-school basketball star who died in a car accident at 17, and doesn't get around to telling it until about 200 pages later. But the impact of her accomplishments, specifically the way she fits into the tribe's concept of heroism, could only fully register when placed in context, however meandering the author's account can become at times. In stories like Big Crow's, On The Rez finds strength and permanence on dwindling reservations like Pine Ridge, where Indians refuse to get with "the program" and persist in a place where "the earth is just the earth, unadorned."