Just two hundred years ago, the landscape of the western half of the United States was not as it is today. Easterners had not widely interrupted life on the Plains, and Native Americans were living mostly within their ancestors' cultures, which had adapted to and been entwined with the land for over one hundred centuries. Over the next two, a wave of European immigrants would do their best to drown that culture, molding the landscape to serve themselves. In the fury of Manifest Destiny, these pioneers often veiled their racism as a righteous quest for a better life.
To this day, Native populations are mending the scabs left by the oppression of white, European culture, which is also my culture. This project reckons with our violent legacy of colonialism on the Plains. Through the work I grapple with my history, my family's history, and my culture's history. The viewer is forced to do the same.
Despite the existence and historical significance of the objects I photograph, the style of the photos makes the images appear surreal, as if in a dream. This contradiction forces a viewer from my culture to confront his or her nostalgic notions about our ancestors and their roles in the attempted erasure of Native culture. The otherworldly and saturated style can also be seen as an exaggerated statement about how our culture depicts elements of the United States' westward expansion: pioneer spirit as something valiant, and Native Americans as a people of the past.
Buffalo skull rests in a cemetery
These handcuffs were used to take Native children from parents and bring them to the Haskell Indian boarding school.
An offshoot of the Oregon Trail
A white rancher erected this cross at site where Crazy Horse's body once rested.
A journalist took this piston from the site of Wounded Knee Massacre.
Hotel room where Nelson Miles oversaw 7th Cavalry's effort to end the ghost dance
Most locals don't know that a Native man was once lynched in this small town Iowa square.
The White Man's roads and fences split the land, and the west would never be the same.
Great Fathers carved into sacred Lakota land, once guaranteed to them by treaty
Shelf in antique store
Children put questions on the wall at the Nebraska History Museum.
Touching an enemy with a coup stick and escaping uninjured was a Lakota warrior's highest honor.
The Milky Way, or the Trail of the Spirits