ABOUT THE BOOK

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, once known as American POW Camp #344, is a sprawling area of land that encompasses part of the Lakota Sioux tribe’s traditional homeland, the Black Hills of South Dakota. Sadly, Pine Ridge is now the quintessential example of the failure of the reservation system with staggering statistics on everything from violent crime to education.  The unemployment rate is nearly 90% and the life expectancy for men is 48, roughly the same as Afghanistan and Somalia.

In this powerful new book of photographs, Aaron Huey portrays both the broken social landscape and the ceremonial warrior culture that permeates Pine Ridge today.  This body of work goes far beyond the obvious poverty and into the world of the tribe’s visions and dreams.  Huey, a photographer who has covered war and crises in some of the most far-flung places on the planet for magazines like the New Yorker and The New York Times, stumbled upon Pine Ridge seven years ago. Since then he has created one of the single largest bodies of work on a contemporary Indian Reservation.  His images stand as a chilling testament to the complexity and difficulties facing the Lakota Sioux tribe and all indigenous people.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Aaron Huey is a photojournalist who works primarily for National Geographic and Harper’s Magazine where he is a Contributing Editor and the only photographer on the masthead of the 162-year-old magazine. Huey is widely known for his 3,349-mile solo walk across America with his dog Cosmo in 2002.  The journey lasted 154 days, there was no media coverage and they walked every step.  Following the walk Huey took a 2 1/2 year hiatus from shooting photos to build an artist-in-residence program called Hueyhaus from the ground up on the Pecos River east of Santa Fe. Aaron now uses Seattle, Washington as a home base in between assignments. He is a Stanford Knight Fellow and Stanford d.School Global Leader. His work is represented by Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles.