Shannon County, South Dakota, home to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, has been among the top 3 poorest counties in the United States for the past 30 years. The historic site of the infamous Wounded Knee Massacre, Pine Ridge continues to be the setting for an ongoing massacre within the tribe today. Gangs rule much of the reservation, and the violence they live by grips even the smallest villages. Unemployment on the reservation hovers around 90 percent, the housing office is unable to afford to build new structures, and existing structures are falling apart. The number is unknown, but many families are homeless, and even more are packed into homes with up to 5 families. The tribal government and police are corrupt, and offer no solution to the problem of homelessness. Many elders are raising their grandchildren because their own children have succumbed to alcoholism, domestic violence, and general apathy. Making life even grimmer, more than half of the population over the age of 40 suffers from diabetes and the life expectancy for men is a mere 48 years. Suicide is some areas has reached almost epidemic proportions. As the years go by, the predicament of Pine Ridge fails to improve, and in many ways only worsens.
Many of these issues are well covered, but what most of this body of work focuses on is beyond the over-documented stereotype of the hopelessness of the “alcoholic native.” There is a much bigger problem enveloping the reservation, it is one that has the ability to steal the last remnants of the Lakota culture from the next generations. Even in the tiny village of Wounded Knee (population 150), a stone’s throw from the massacre site, one can see the Lakota ways replaced by the crime-culture of America’s urban inner cities. Young Natives have appropriated the language and lifestyle of their favorite Hip Hop MCs, gangsters, and violent film stars. The heroes of today’s reservation youth are easy to spot, they are on every T-shirt, on their children’s blankets, and on the posters covering their bedroom walls: they are Tu-Pac Shakur, 50 Cent, and Al Pachino (as Scar Face).
The model is this: a quick rise to power (often from a poor home), big money, women, cars, drugs, and death (or narrow escape from death) in a hail of bullets. Oddly the death by violence is embraced as readily as the power and money, considered a necessary price for playing “the game.” TVs on the reservation are not tuned into cable, but rather an endless stream of violent action films bought, pirated, and traded on DVDs. The masks that one group documented in this photo essay wear are a way of expressing their attachment to, and glorification of, darkness, violence, and death. In the past 10 years gang violence has exploded and consumes every village on the reservation. Youth that left the reservation 10-15 years ago saw the power of gangs and their leaders in cities like Chicago and LA, and returned to their villages proclaiming the virtues of the gang structure. More money, more protection, more power. The Bloods and Cripps of Compton L.A. are now represented in Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
With all of the foreign conflicts in the world we often forget about the ones at home, the ones that involve our own indigenous populations, the suppression of those populations, and culture wars that surround them. Pine Ridge represents on an extreme level, all reservations in the US. And all oppressed Indigenous groups around the world. I hope that this work will bring to light both the lost and the found in this complex community. Towards the end of my 5th and most recent journey to Pine Ridge in August of this year (for the Oglala Nation Pow Wow) I found that there is a light in this darkness, and a path that some Lakota youth still walk, one that they call “the Red Road.” This bears witness to the struggle of a people in the shadow of genocide, in the shadow of America’s most iconic massacre, in the shadow of Wounded Knee. I hope that they will also bring to light the brave young people who are attempting to bring their people back to the Lakota way through the Pow Wows, the renewed efforts with language, sweats and sun dances. The way back to the Red Road is a difficult one, a new trail of tears, a battle that takes many lives, and a battle that is far from over.
Is it wrong to expect that after nearly 150 years that the indigenous tribes assimilate into society as have legal immigrants to this country?
