Question

In relation to the text "On the Rez" by Ian Frazier

1. How does Fraizer blend history and the present to flesh out the modern reality of life on the Pine Ridge Reservation?

2. How does Fraizer keep his non-fiction book from beoming romanticized or sentimental?

Answer 1

Life on the Pine Ridge Native American reservation

Where life expectancy is the second-lowest in the western hemisphere and 80 percent of people are unemployed.

The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which encompasses more than 2.8 million acres, was established in 1889 [Patrick Strickland/Al Jazeera]

Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, United States - Donald Morrison's one-room home, hidden behind a row of trees, can only be reached via a half-kilometre dirt path.

He lives on his family's ancestral land. His uncle's and brother's trailer homes are nearby. Donald's yard is dotted with rusting automobiles - decaying and half-dismembered, excavated for car parts.

A few metres from the wooden steps leading to his front door sits the decrepit structure - made from a pop-up trailer, scrap wood and tarps - that he lived in for two decades before the local charity Families Working Together  built him a tiny home in 2011.

Donald, 60, has lived on his family's land his whole life. Time passes slowly in his corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation, and at no point in his six decades have local authorities connected his family's miniature community of shacks and trailers to the reservation's electricity grid or provided them with running water.

They use car batteries and generators for a few hours of electricity a day, and Donald heats up a five-gallon bucket of water on a wood stove to bathe and wash his clothes a few times a week.

The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which encompasses more than 2.8 million acres, was established in 1889 as Camp 334 for indigenous prisoners of war as white colonists pressed westward across the North American continent.

Question no 2

From Kapuscinski to Knausgaard, from Mantel to Macfarlane, more and more writers are challenging the border between fiction and nonfiction. Here Geoff Dyer – longtime master of the space between, in books such as But Beautiful and Out of Sheer Rage – argues that there is no single path to ‘truth’ while, below, writers on both sides of the divide share their thoughts…