new bleu

I love/need the West. 

newyorker:

Kalpesh Lathigra’s “Lost in the Wilderness”

The fiction piece in our January 10th issue, “The Years of My Birth,” by Louise Erdrich, opened with an image from Kalpesh Lathigra’s recent series “Lost in the Wilderness,” which presents an insightful, and ultimately hopeful, look at life on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, home to the Oglala-Lakota (Sioux) tribe. “The series was part of a project looking at forgotten communities around the world,” Lathigra says. The Oglala-Lakota “are descendants of the great leaders and medicine men such as Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, American Horse and Black Elk, to name but a few. Another great leader was Sitting Bull, of the Hunkpapa Lakota, who was the overseer for the Battle of the Bighorn in 1876, where Crazy Horse led the people into defeating George Custer and the Seventh Cavalry.”

Lathigra’s interest in the tribe had a personal angle. “In playground games of Cowboys and Indians, I always played the Indian for the reason my family is from India,” he says. “As I grew older and realized the connotations, it gave me reason to explore my namesake.” Here’s a selection from what he found.