We were moved by the TED talk of Seattle-based photojournalist Aaron Huey; he described his work with the Lakota Sioux in Pine Ridge. The Lakota have endured a long history of attack by racist expansionism, including the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890, and today their community struggles to deal with poverty, unemployment, poor health, and gang violence.
Our Philadelphia-based photojournalist Ed Cunicelli has also worked closely with Native American communities, especially at the White Mountain Apache reservation.
I asked Ed to weigh in on the issues covered in Huey’s talk, and he told me he needed some time to think it over.
Part of the reason is that this is a deep and complicated issue, one I also feel very passionate about and need to take time to digest.
Ed was struck by the personal quality of Huey’s photographs and talk, and saw a lot of intersection with his own work. Not only did the same themes surface—war, poverty—but also a certain “sensitivity to Indian affairs in general, the realities for all Native American People.” The photographs shown in the talk brought up some of Ed’s own experiences.
I’ve worked on several reservations myself and sometimes I have to remind myself where I am because there are so many frightening similarities our native people share.
Ed also identified certain characteristics of working as a photographer that are essential to working with Native people. He emphasizes the importance of shifting from “landscape to environment to portrait and then back again.” It’s important for a photographer to make himself welcomes, by being “respectful of the Lakota Culture.” The kind of “history lesson” one learns from the images and from the timeline in the TED talk was, for Ed, “much needed for every American to hear, and much needed for every photographer to understand before setting foot on Indian land.”
Ed made sure to reemphasize a point whose importance he and Huey both recognize:
War on Indians that continues to this day—not an opinion, a fact. Our government took land from the Lakota and most all other tribes, displaced many others and even slaughtered hundreds that were in the way of expansion. What’s most troubling is that it’s still happening today.
He only parted ways with Huey’s final demand to return the land to the Lakota—not because it goes too far, but rather, because Ed wants to take the point further.
Injustice has been served to all tribes. The larger picture is, it’s about all Native people; I just thought the call to action should have included other tribes as well.
I asked Ed to send me some examples of his photography, which you can see in this piece. They focus especially on the youth of the reservation, “a mixed bag of hope and despair,” One image shows two young boys facing a wall, with “nowhere to go,” Ed said.
A home is a shadow, a metaphor for an empty house, the same shirt represents a prison system—two boys in a metaphorical prison system.
While that image captures the dilemmas that young Native American people face, the other image shows some level of defiance. Ed calls this photo “Lord Darkmouth”:
Laughing in the face of Lord Darkmouth. Who is Lord Darkmouth? Sounds like he’s a bad guy, to me—he must be feared. But being an Indian means laughing at such things… even the dreaded Lord Darkmouth.