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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.

It was great, but it’s funny because Indians are so invisible and because my career has gotten so big that I think people…they don’t forget that I’m Indian, but it becomes very secondary to the success. When I was on Colbert I had a double consciousness or triple consciousness about it…I was in the moment but then I was also thinking that this is really revolutionary for Indians…a rez boy holding his own verbally with one of the best in the business. It was big. I was proud that I also have that artistic ability. It was fun. He was a great guy. He came into the green room afterwards and congratulated me, which was very decent of him.

- Sherman Alexie talking about appearing on the Stephen Colbert show and making Colbert “speechless”.

via (The Sherman Alexie Interview::Failbetter.com)

The collection was originally titled Thrash. Why did you change it to Face?

Because when people would pronounce it and talk about the book in interviews they’d always call it Trash. And when my poetry editor emailed me once, even he typed Trash by mistake. So I thought, okay, I’m changing it. Although now whenever I get interviewed or talk about it people are calling it Fate instead of Face. And someone pointed out yesterday that if you look at the cover—I knew this was going to be a little bit of an issue, but I just let it go because the cover is so beautiful—someone pointed out that if you look at the title a certain way it looks like it says Taco.

http://cornellsun.com/section/news/content/2009/03/09/native-american-writer-...

By Byungkwan Park

“Just so you know, I got here because of rage,” said Sherman Alexie, an award-winning Native American writer and occasional comedian, in a half-serious, half-facetious manner at the Statler Auditorium in his Friday evening lecture, “The Partially True Story of the True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.”

Alexie’s first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian won the 2007 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. The lecture, which was based on this novel, presented an overview of the author’s childhood and development as a writer.

Alexie frequently elicited laughter from the nearly 600-person audience as he often joked about the many tragedies of his younger years.

As a six-month-old baby, Alexie needed brain surgery due to an abnormal accumulation of water in his brain, a condition called hydrocephalus. Although he survived the surgery, he suffered seizure throughout his childhood. The sickness, however, was only one part of Alexie’s rough childhood.

“I was sick, very sick, and very poor on top of that … Even your food was constantly reminding you of how poor you were,” Alexie said.

Alexie grew up eating food provided by the government with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. Partly as a result of the reservation’s impoverishment, Alexie developed a rather bitter outlook on life as an adolescent.

According to Alexie, he was dehumanized constantly as a poor, disabled Native American.

“I personally hate any philosophy that dehumanizes human beings,” Alexie said.

“You don’t live like that and not collect pounds and pounds of rage,” he added.

Alexie pointed to the audience to address and belittle existing Native American stereotypes.

“You thought you were the ones colonized,” Alexie said sarcastically. “I wish we were the people that you think we are, and I wish you were the people in the Declaration of Independence.”

Sherman Alexie on The Colbert Report