Aaron Huey: Mitakuye Oyasin: All My Relations (Pine Ridge Reserve)

Aaron Huey has photographed the Oglala Lakota for seven years. The community of Sioux is confined to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, about 75 miles southeast of the Black Hills. 

*I can’t find one description of this project that isn’t problematic, so I leave it to others to research on their own. Despite the accolades of TED talks, National Geographic and now a movie shot with OBEY, there are still complex issues over an outsider, entrenched in colonial implications, taking pictures of this community and presenting it to the outside world. Because of some issues over photos of sacred ceremonies that the photographer took, I have chosen to exclude those images from this post. THAT SAID the 7 year investment the photographer has made to establish real relationships with the community and explore a highly complex social/political/colonial issue can be respected.

The best thing to come out of this project is arguably the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project. This collection tells the story of life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, told by the people of Pine Ridge in their own unedited words.