Blackfeet Indian youth, like most adolescents, have it rough. But, whereas many kids face problems like how to gain popularity, pass chemistry class, and make the football team, Native American teens face an additional and more weighty proposition: how do they hold onto the rich cultural heritage and steer clear of the many social ills plaguing reservations? Many of the tribal elders view these as one and the same question—to live according to the old ways of the tribe is to avoid the many pitfalls of life on the reservation. To them, hope for the future lies in honoring the past.
I began visiting the Blackfeet Indian reservation in summer of 2008 to photograph youth in the ongoing flux of establishing their identities. The more time I spent on the reservation, the less relevant my inherited ‘outsider’ stereotypes became. “This reservation is a world unto itself,” I was told. And I found that within that world lived such a broad range of personalities, stories, and ways of life that I can’t even pretend to truly express that world through photographs. What I do hope to do is to provide some frames of reference that might help people to better understand what its like to grow up on the reservation.