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All photos by Aaron Huey and can be seen at the New York Times interview here.

Aaron Huey arrived on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota at the start of a self-assigned photographic road trip to document poverty in America.

The poverty he found on the reservation stopped him cold.

"Pine Ridge is the scariest place I've ever been - more so than in a Taliban ambush," Mr. Huey said.  "It was emotionally devastating.  I'd call my wife late at night crying."

Overwhelmed by the poverty – and at the same time by scenes of people trying to maintain the Lakota way of life – Mr. Huey abandoned the rest of his nationwide project to focus on Pine Ridge.  Five years later, he's still photographing on the reservation, which includes the Wounded Knee battlefield.

Mr. Huey, 33, is a photgrapher for National Geographic Adventure and National Geographic Traveler.  He also freelances for The New Yorker and Geo.  In 2007, he photographed in Afghanistan for The Times.

Still Wounded is an amazing photo series and great interview on this photographer and what he sees on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

via ABC News:

“Alcohol is connected to suicides across all [racial and ethnic] groups,” Dr. Alex Crosby of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control said.  “When programs try to address suicide prevention, they should definitely include alcohol as one component.”

Alcohol has long been a known risk factor in suicide, said Dr. Eric Caine, chair of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y.

But the study is unique because it examines the role of alcohol in suicides across all ethnic groups — data that has been limited in prior studies, Crosby said.

“This is a really importan paper because it underscores how much a common risk factor such as drinking contributes to something like suicide,” Caine said. “Here’s more data on how something like alcohol is fuel on the fire, and we need to ask ourselves what we are going to do about it.”

from Indianz.com:

A city on the Yakama Nation in Washington is cracking down on public drinking.

Offenders up to 90 days in jail and up to a $1,000 fine for drinking in public in Wapato. “It’s something to say, ‘Hey, we’re not playing games — we’re doing something about it,” police chief Richard Sanchez told The Yakima Herald-Republic. The Yakama Nation tried to ban alcohol sales on the reservation a few years ago. But non-Indian businesses in places like Wapato objected. It’s those businesses that cater to a largely Indian client base. “This is an everyday thing we do out here,” Valerie Jolene Sampson, a tribal member, says of her drinking habits.

This is the poem that the short story “What You Pawn, I Will Redeem” from Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians is based on. I know that I keep talking about this book, but it has turned out to be very special to me. The story is about a homeless Spokane Indian that sees his grandmother’s stolen regalia (it was a Native American garment) in a pawn shop and spends 24 hours trying to get $1000 to buy it. He is battling alcoholism, but he wants to be a hero and buy it back because his grandmother, who had died many years prior, meant a lot to him.

Admonitions

boys
i don’t promise you nothing
but this
what you pawn
i will redeem
what you steal
i will conceal
my private silence to
your public guilt
is all i got

girls
first time a white man
opens his fly
like a good thing
we’ll just laugh
laugh real loud my
black women

children
when they ask you
why is your mama so funny
say
she is a poet
she don’t have no sense

-Lucille Clifton

That story was tragic and funny, heartbreaking and amusing.

via wikirocks