Views From The Reservation

Mitakye Oyasin. These words, which are spoken at the beginning and end of Oglala Lakota prayers, translate as “all my relations.” Together they are an acknowledgement of all things being related, a deliberate reminder that all we do will affect all else and the balance within the world.

When thinking of the Pine Ridge Reservation, what do people imagine? What are the preconceived notions that outsiders carry about the place, the people, the culture, and their way of life? Pine Ridge is the Oglala Lakota Tribe’s home, a territory that once covered an area from Minnesota west to the sacred Black Hills (Paha Sapa) of southwestern South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. Today, the reservation has been reduced to an area of approximately 50 by 100 miles. Both outsiders and native peoples know of Hollywood’s representation of traditional American Indian culture. So often it has been based on the Lakota and other indigenous people of the Great Plains and Interior West. Most of us have heard of Wounded Knee, the massacre there in 1890, and its occupation by the American Indian Movement and its supporters in 1973. Today, Pine Ridge includes some of the poorest counties in the United States, with an average per capita income of $4,000, low life expectancy, and high rates of infant mortality, suicide, diabetes, alcoholism, and unemployment. How or why would one choose to ignore these facts when speaking of reservation life? Yet how much do these statistics really tell us? Life on Pine Ridge is filled with extremes, the most positive to most negative. In the face of hardship, there is immense beauty and warmth.

For the past 19 years, I’ve traveled regularly to Pine Ridge. My annual visits to the reservation have been to the region known as Lost Dog Creek, where I have been a guest of the Reddest family. The photographs in this collection are a sampling of what I have done and seen during my visits over the years. As an outsider, I have always been welcomed by the Reddest family. Their hospitality and willingness to share their lives and stories about their community has deepened my respect for them and my relationship with the Lakota people.

I came to exhibiting these images with some difficulty. I am aware of the debates and issues that can arise when photographers, especially Caucasian photographers, enter the lives of indigenous people. As history tells us, photography played a large role in the U.S. Government outlawing all traditional Lakota spiritual practice and rituals for 40 years during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Photography and other tools of documentarians were used to convince the U.S. Government that the native people were practicing so-called “barbaric” rituals. For those 40 years, traditional Lakota practices were kept alive by those who were willing to risk imprisonment by secretly having their ceremonies while hiding in the plains. Today, these practices are again legal and growing in popularity, but the distrust of photography and documentarians still exists and understandably so.

Yet the greatest motivation for wanting to exhibit these images came from within Pine Ridge, from the patriarch of the Reddest family, Eugene Reddest himself. During one of the last times we shared together before his passing, Eugene wanted to know how I would use the photographs I had made of his family and friends. I told him that I planned to only use them as mementos for his family, mutual friends, and to keep for myself. He requested that I use them in ways that might help his family and people.

I have made the book project Views from the Reservation and corresponding exhibit and the corresponding book with Eugene very much in mind. The book includes various attempts at giving Lakota people a voice in the project including archival photos from the Pine Ridge community and the vibrant ledger paper drawings by Oglala Lakota artist Dwayne Wilcox, youth poetry, elders words, a CD of traditional music, and various essays in conversation with my own, as a way to offer the viewer a wider range of representation of the native culture. I hope that the project will raise awareness and have some value as he Eugene hoped.

I would like to dedicate this work to Eugene Reddest and Tommy Crow, his cousin and best friend from Pine Ridge who befriended me. I am grateful for the openness that Eugene and Tommy showed me. It truly was an inspiration to have known them. All royalties from the book are being donated to KILI Radio, Voice of the Lakota Nation.

Mitakye Oyasin