The Olympic Peninsula has been home to humans for at least ten thousand years. Its Indigenous peoples, though neighbors on the same rugged landscape, were not a single people but distinct nations, each shaped by their particular relationship to the land and water around them. Along the outer Pacific coast were the Quinault*, masters of the river and the open ocean. At the northwestern tip, the Makah* built a culture around deep-sea whaling, venturing into the Pacific in cedar canoes to hunt gray and humpback whales. And along the sheltered waters of Hood Canal lived the Twana, a people of the inland sea, of salmon rivers and cedar forests, and the calm, cold waters of the canal itself. It is from the Twana that the Skokomish descend, their name meaning, simply, “people of the river.” It is at the mouth of the Skokomish River, where it meets the Great Bend of Hood Canal, that they have lived since before memory begins.

In 1792, British naval officer George Vancouver sailed Hood Canal. The Twana were well established, living in permanent winter villages along the water and moving seasonally into the mountains and upriver to follow the food cycles. He saw smoke rising from longhouses, cedar canoes patrolling the inlets, and a meticulously managed landscape.

When I arrived in 1992, I found a very different world. I found a place that was not unlike any other rural community in the area, with mostly modest homes, cars and pickups, a mix of paved and dirt roads... I also found Gerald Bruce Miller.

Just over six feet tall, Bruce presented an imposing figure, but quickly proved amiable and generous with his time.

Through an 1855 treaty, the lands of the Twana peoples** were reduced to a 5,000-acre reservation. What followed was a systematic national policy of forced assimilation, one imposed on Indigenous peoples across the continent. In 1870, a boarding school was opened for 26 years, followed by a shift to off-reservation industrial schools. For the Skokomish, the consequences were devastating. They were strictly forbidden from speaking Twana, their native language. They lost the accumulated knowledge of how to manage the river delta and the forests that were so much a part of their culture. Traditions, ceremonies, and ways of understanding the world that had been refined over thousands of years were suppressed within a generation or two.

“Miller” is itself a shadow of the boarding school era, when surnames were imposed.

Bruce’s Skokomish name was Subiyay.

Subiyay was a college graduate and a Vietnam veteran. In the early 1970s, he worked in New York City as an actor, dancer, and writer. But he was pulled home by everything he had absorbed as the youngest of fifteen children, raised among elders, stories from his great-grandmother, basketweaving from an aunt, fragments of the Twana language, and a deep knowledge of the forest, the berries, and the plants of the peninsula.

He came back to learn what he didn’t yet know, and to give back what he did.

For the rest of his life, Subiyay served as the tribe’s cultural and educational director, dedicating himself to sustaining what had nearly been lost. He became the keeper of more than 120 traditional stories, some taking days to tell, and built a large repertoire of songs, dances, and ceremonial knowledge. He brought winter ceremonies back to his people and helped revive the First Salmon and First Elk ceremonies, once banned by the U.S. government. He was a master of basketry, textile weaving, and wood carving, and made ceremonial regalia and masks. Critically, he was also one of the last people who could speak the Twana language, and was working urgently to record as much of it as possible before it disappeared entirely.

For the portrait we would make together, he chose to be shown in the longhouse he led the effort to build in 1982, the first traditional longhouse on the Skokomish Reservation in more than 110 years.

Subiyay understood what it meant to watch knowledge vanish, one voice at a time.

He once described it as, “Seeing your teachers disappear is like a forest standing healthy, then over time a few are gone, then half, until there’s just one tree left. I realize I’ve become this forest and that my experiences must be passed along. I will teach whoever comes to learn. My immortality is the teaching I leave behind.”

Subiyay died in 2005 at age 60. His forest was not reduced to a single tree.

* The Makah and Quinault are the subjects of separate posts. Both are still in production at this writing.

** The Twana were a group of Indigenous communities along Hood Canal who shared a common language and culture. In the late 18th century they likely numbered between 1,500 and 2,500 people. Disease, displacement, and assimilation policies in the 19th century sharply reduced their population. Today, their descendants are largely represented by the Skokomish Tribe, the primary surviving Twana-speaking community, with roughly 800 enrolled members.

In the nineteenth century, treaty cessions and federal removal policies displaced many Potawatomi communities westward. Some families remained in Michigan. Ceremonial traditions and forms of dress continued within families despite political and geographic change.

Elizabeth Chivas is the fourth of five generations of the Whitepigeon/Pigeon family born in Holland, Michigan and is of Potawatomi and Ojibwe descent. Her spirit name is Ga-zhoowa-gimi-wan, meaning Warm Rain.

She serves as W’Okimawkwe (head woman) of the Whitepigeon family, is a Pipe Carrier, and is a board member of the Midéwewin Midé Widjig, a federally and state recognized ecclesiastical organization based on pre-Columbian Algonquin teachings. The organization was incorporated in Holland in 1991 by her grandfather Edward Whitepigeon, her father Jerome Whitepigeon, and Howard L. La Hurreau.

She is shown in women’s woodland traditional regalia reflecting styles worn for special occasions in the mid to late 1800s. The yellow and red ribbon blouse with silver brooches follows Potawatomi tradition, while the ribbon skirt reflects her Ojibwe heritage. Elizabeth and members of her family and community made the elements of the outfit. Her hat is woven from black ash. Her necklaces are made from apple seeds, cedar seeds, and shells. Her choker and earrings include dentalium shells from the Pacific Northwest, once widely traded between tribes.

The long skirt, ribbonwork, and layered beadwork reflect forms worn for formal gatherings and public occasions at the turn of the twentieth century.

The harbor structures are modern. The forms of dress shown in both images are traditional. Anishinaabe families are still here.

As American settlement expanded westward, Ojibwe leaders pursued their own diplomatic strategies to protect their homelands. During the War of 1812, many bands calculated that an alliance with the British offered the best chance of checking American expansion. It was a strategic decision made on their own terms, not simply a choice of sides. Chiefs were sometimes presented with red military coats as diplomatic gifts, visible signs of alliance and mutual obligation. They became prized possessions, and the Hudson Bay Company carried on the gifting of redcoats to chiefs who had been friendly and of service to them.

Among the leaders navigating those years was Chief Buffalo of the La Pointe Band on Lake Superior. Born around 1780, he spent decades arguing that his people had never agreed to abandon their Lake Superior homelands. In 1852, at nearly ninety years old, he led a delegation by canoe to Washington, D.C. to directly confront removal orders. It was a journey of extraordinary determination that helped ensure many Ojibwe communities remained in the region.

The nineteenth century brought land cessions and reservations, but Ojibwe communities endured in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather continued and were reaffirmed in federal courts in the twentieth century.

The redcoat traces to that treaty era in the upper Great Lakes. The Ojibwe communities connected to it remain there today.

Thirty years later, while reviewing past images, I came across the photograph again and decided to do more than file it away. Their presence, his digital watch, the lawn chairs, the Styrofoam cup resting on a plastic jug, the incidental teepee, all added up to something quietly compelling.

Because I include information and identification in my photographs whenever possible, I contacted an old friend, Walter Littlemoon, who lived at Wounded Knee, to see if he might recognize them. He did.

The man was Frank Fools Crow. The woman beside him was his wife, Kate.

Only then did I discover that this was among my more significant images.

On December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on this very ground. Nearly 300 Lakota people were killed, most of them women, children, and elders. The massacre is often described as the closing chapter of the Indian Wars, marking the end of Native American freedom of movement.

That same year, just a few miles from where this photograph was made, Frank Fools Crow was born.

Frank Fools Crow was a revered Oglala Lakota spiritual leader, Yuwipi medicine man, and ceremonial chief, and a nephew of Black Elk. Raised in the traditional Lakota way, he left formal schooling early at his father’s insistence and never became fluent in English. As a young man, he traveled with the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Show, an experience that exposed him to the wider world even as he remained firmly rooted in Lakota spiritual life.

For decades, Fools Crow served his people as a healer, teacher, and spiritual guide, leading ceremonies at a time when many Indigenous religious practices were discouraged or outlawed. In 1973, during the American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee, his presence carried moral and spiritual authority. Though not a militant leader, he played a key role in helping negotiate a peaceful end to the armed standoff.

Fools Crow embodied a living bridge between the trauma of the past and the endurance of Lakota spiritual tradition. Born in the shadow of the 1890 massacre, he lived through the "dark period" when Indigenous ceremonies were criminalized and children were punished for speaking their native tongues. He survived to see the tide finally turn, witnessing the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, which formally protected the right of Native Americans to practice their traditional religions and speak their languages openly. By the time I encountered him, he wasn't just a leader; he was a victor who had helped carry his culture across a century of attempted erasure.

The woman seated beside him is his second wife, Kate Fools Crow. They were married in 1958, and she remained a constant, quiet strength by his side until her death in October 1988. A gifted traditional artist, her beadwork and meticulously crafted Lakota dresses are now preserved in museum collections as a testament to her own dedication to their culture.

Frank’s first wife, Fannie Afraid, died in 1954.

Frank Fools Crow died on November 27, 1989, believed to be 99 years old.

I did not know who Frank Fools Crow was when I made this photograph. I only knew that something about the scene called out to me for preservation. Photographs often wait for context and time to catch up. What I thought I had photographed was a quiet moment at a pow wow. What I had actually recorded was presence.

The image did its work long after I put the camera down.

Campbell represented a new breed of Western politician—someone who could bridge rugged individualism with a deep commitment to environmental conservation.

On assignment for Newsweek, I met him on a mesa overlooking the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, his signature cause. At the time, he was pushing legislation through the House to expand the boundaries of the National Monument, a necessary step toward its eventual designation as a National Park. He had also launched a Senate campaign that would soon make him the first Native American to serve in the U.S. Senate in more than sixty years.

His relaxed manner and genuine warmth were immediately apparent, and we hit it off easily. He knew of my photographic work with Native Americans, and neither of us was in a hurry to be somewhere else. We spent the afternoon talking and watching as the sun moved west and the deep canyon slowly filled with shadow.

Over the next few years, other assignments took me to Durango, Colorado, and to his home in nearby Ignacio.

In Durango, after lunch with staff, Campbell, ever approachable, moved to the counter to drink coffee. There he sat talking with locals and listening to whatever anyone cared to add to the conversation.

We disagreed on numerous topics, but agreed on more. We debated motorcycle helmet laws. He opposed them. I told him stories of patients I had photographed in a head-injury hospital. Neither of us persuaded the other, but as always, the exchange was amiable.

Campbell was also a highly accomplished Indian jewelry designer. He incorporated techniques he had learned from sword makers in Japan, producing work that was both traditional and innovative. Through his jewelry, he had become a millionaire years before entering politics.

Late in 1993, I was honored to be invited as his guest to the opening performance of Black Elk Speaks at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. As he introduced the show, he unexpectedly pointed me out to the audience and referred to me as a good friend.

It remains one of those moments that stays with you—not because of the spotlight, but because of who was holding it.

Congressional Highlights:

• Sponsored the legislation that created the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, helping memorialize the 1864 atrocity against the Cheyenne and Arapaho people.

• Was a key backer of the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall .

• Advocated for renaming the Custer Battlefield to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, reflecting Indigenous perspectives .

• Played a leading role in expanding the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument, helping pave the way for its designation as a National Park.

• Advocated for the protection of Great Sand Dunes, contributing to its eventual designation as a National Park and Preserve.

By almost any long-term measure, the average human alive today lives better than the vast majority of humans who have ever existed. Roughly half of the world’s population is now estimated to live at a middle-class level or higher. Much of the remaining half, about 3.5 billion people, lives at what economists classify as poverty levels.

As a teenager working with a surveying crew in Appalachia, I was struck by how close extreme poverty was to my home in Virginia. It wasn’t an abstract idea or a distant headline; it was right there, in my face.

I encountered it again later, when I deliberately pursued it as a photojournalist at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, identified by the 1980 census as the poorest community in the United States. This was during the same period when famine in Ethiopia held the world’s attention.

Although this photograph was made more than forty years ago, poverty remains a defining reality here. Recent census estimates show a median household income of roughly $2,500 per year, with nearly all residents living below the federal poverty level.

I found Wilbur working outside his one-room house, trying to put in a garden despite the hard, dry ground of the semi-arid prairie.

Everyone was always welcoming, but seeing how their lives contrasted with my own was an intense experience. I’ve often wondered how these children have fared in the forty-plus years since.

Poverty doesn’t go away. It exists in our own backyards as surely as it does across the planet.

My role here is simply to call attention to the situation.

My conscience and I will continue the conversation privately.

Edward Curtis was an American photographer who devoted more than 30 years of his life to documenting Native American tribes in the early 20th century. Between 1907 and 1930, he created thousands of photographs and extensive written records of more than 80 tribes. His images captured ceremonies, daily life, and portraits of tribal members at a moment of profound cultural change and displacement.

Although my own efforts fall well short of matching his vast undertaking, Curtis has been an ongoing inspiration in my pursuit of documenting more recent generations of Native Americans. Beginning more than 50 years after the last of his photographs, I’ve worked to document a time marked by cultural revival, resilience, and evolution.

At one point, my work led me to the pueblos of New Mexico, and ultimately to Tesuque Pueblo. The 500-year-old community remains one of the more traditional pueblos. After three years of visits, conversations, and no photography, I was granted permission to photograph two young dancers, James Duran and Tun-te’ Vigil, performing the sacred Buffalo Dance. This dance expresses gratitude and respect for the buffalo’s historic role in providing sustenance and materials. Through intermittent snow showers they danced, and together we preserved a moment for future generations.

Seventy years earlier, Edward Curtis had also visited Tesuque Pueblo and photographed two male Buffalo Dancers. Viewing the two images side by side reveals how much has changed, and how much has endured. For me, those differences underscore the importance of creating a continuing visual record.

Curtis’s romantic, often staged portraits have been both celebrated for their artistic power and criticized for reinforcing simplified or stereotyped views of Native life. Can I hope to do better? My images inevitably reflect my own perceptions. The choices I make of whom to photograph, whether to capture a smile or a solemn expression, eyes toward the camera or gazing beyond, all shape the story as much as any moment itself.

As with Curtis, my photographs are simply one man’s best effort to interpret and pass along images and stories. There are innumerous facets to every one of them.

On another note, I’ve promised to avoid filling your email inbox with these articles. For every one that you receive there are others simply posted to the site, such as On Inspiration and Style. I hope you’ll take the time to look in.

At the time, I knew little about the Indian boarding schools. Only later did I begin to understand the deeper meaning of the stories Ruth had told me. She spoke of being sent away to school, where children were punished if they were caught speaking their native Lakota. They were forbidden to do anything that reflected their Indian heritage.

What stayed with me most was Ruth’s joy at seeing her grandchildren learning those very things she and her generation had been taught to forget. She was proud to see them reclaiming their language, their songs, and their way of life; and she was happy to teach me a few Lakota words and phrases too.

Like Ruth, many elders I met carried memories of the boarding school years. Among them was a man whose life spanned the entire century: John Old Shield.

My search for Native American subjects led me to a 96-year-old medicine man named John Old Shield. He lived with his dog in a small bungalow just outside downtown Denver, tucked in the shadow of a busy highway overpass over the rail yards.

John was pleased to share some time, telling me stories about the way things were. He had been born as an Oglala Lakota Sioux in 1894 on the Pine Ridge Reservation. As a young boy, he and later his brother had been sent off to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

The Carlisle boarding school became infamous for its mission of forced assimilation to ‘Kill the Indian and Save the Man.’ Upon arrival, the children’s clothing was burned and their long hair cut off. John told me of how they were punished if they were caught speaking their Lakota language or doing anything reflective of their native life.

Those efforts had not erased John’s identity. He remained fluent in Lakota and later returned to the reservation as a tribal leader. He became a medicine man; a healer. Out of respect for the spirit of those responsibilities, he wouldn’t reveal details to me about that role.

Though he spent several years in Denver, John eventually returned home to the reservation. He died there in 1995, at the age of 101.

Both Ruth and John serve as reminders that even under the burden of forced assimilation, culture endures, quietly, stubbornly, and with grace.

After making inquiries at the Denver Indian Center, I found Carmen, Walter, and their family.

Walter and Carmen lived in Denver, where he worked in home construction and she worked as an operations analyst for HUD. Carmen and her twin sister, Camille, were born on the Rosebud Reservation, where their parents had been taught to feel ashamed of their heritage. “I’m really proud of who I am and what I am, from the inside out,” Carmen told me. That pride led the family to participate routinely in powwow dancing and other cultural traditions.

This wah́ǧe, white person, was honored by their friendship over the years, as they offered me introductions and an education unavailable elsewhere. At one point, Carmen even persuaded me to serve on a powwow committee.

Lakota, on the far left and named for the Lakota nation, died in a construction accident in 2019. Carmen, wearing a women’s traditional outfit, holds Maste, “the baby.” The last time I saw Maste was at a powwow, where she carried her own baby. Walter wears a traditional Lakota outfit. Tanksi, front right and in a jingle dress, is now a mother and one of the principals of the Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund, bringing solar energy and job opportunities to tribal communities. Their next generation, too, are being raised with pride in who they are and with deep involvement in their heritage.

My hope has always been to help preserve and pass on that same spirit and pride for future generations.

The grass dance Lakota performs evolved from a time when men tucked long grasses into their belts. Today, the regalia is covered from shoulder to ankle with flowing fringes of brightly colored cloth. The steps and movements are ancient, believed to have originated in a warrior’s dance expressing victory.

Walter’s traditional dance is one of the oldest of the Northern Plains. Some say it began when war parties returned to their villages and danced out the story of battle. The regalia often includes a coup stick, eagle feathers, furs, porcupine quills, beads, and bells, sometimes with pieces handed down through generations.

Footnote: When I first met the family, I was disappointed that Walter wore sunglasses for the portrait. It didn’t fit the stereotype I carried with me. Over the years, I’ve had to keep stepping around my own expectations and learning to open my mind.

His hand-made Northern Traditional outfit reflects both artistry and devotion. Porcupine quill, deer hair, bone, and eagle feathers and talons are worked into the regalia, each material chosen with purpose. In Native traditions, animals are seen as guides, protectors, and teachers. Among them, the eagle is held in the highest esteem, its feathers regarded as sacred gifts.

Because of this significance, Native Americans such as Cody are granted special permission to use eagle feathers and parts for cultural and spiritual purposes, access provided through the National Eagle Repository. For others, eagle parts remain strictly off-limits, a protection meant to honor both wildlife and the traditions that depend upon it.

As a professional dancer raised in a city far from the Great Plains, Coe illustrates how Native traditions adapt and thrive in today’s world, rooted in heritage yet alive in the present.

It was 1984 when I first traveled to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, drawn by reports that it was the poorest community in the United States. As a freelance photojournalist, my livelihood depended largely on me finding stories, then pitching them to the news magazines. I hadn't found any takers for this one, but this was a story I decided was important enough to pursue on my own.

And I found poverty. I was overwhelmed by it. This "seasoned" photojournalist who thought he had seen it all was completely unprepared. I showed up wearing my nice jeans and white Reeboks, driving a near-new, shiny car. I was almost immediately swarmed by drunks and kids asking me for money or wanting who knows what. I panicked and fled driving North into the nearby Badlands. There I did a lot of soul-searching and reflected on what had just transpired before making the six-hour drive back to Denver. I was embarrassed and ashamed.

Two weeks later, this wau gae, white guy, returned, dressed more modestly and driving an older car. I was better prepared emotionally too since I had some idea of what to expect. I also avoided driving into the center of the small community.

I was met by fewer people, very possibly some of the same I had encountered previously, but the situation was similar otherwise. But this time I talked to them. I explained that I wanted to do a story about Wounded Knee and wanted to see how they were living. The next thing I knew I was being taken into homes and introduced to families. I was being offered coffee and a chair. I was welcomed.

Wounded Knee was, and still is, impoverished. The nomadic Lakota had been forced to stop following the buffalo, tatanka, and to settle down on an isolated reservation. There was no source of steady employment, and no way to farm in the middle of an arid prairie. With their culture suppressed, many found themselves idle and dependent on welfare, while alcohol and drugs took hold.

The community of Wounded Knee consists largely of a few clusters of HUD homes spread across the prairie, mostly in disrepair. The lives within each home varied by a lot, but each had its own struggles.

At first, the houses were filled with faces and mystery for me to photograph. But over time and years I developed multiple friendships and insights. I asked questions, I listened, I learned.

I learned about what recent generations had endured. I learned about what many of these individuals had experienced. And I discovered how many of them were not living in despair, but were working to overcome obstacles of the past, to live with dignity and pride in who they were.

In upcoming posts, I'll share some of their stories. Much in the way that I experienced it, I'll move on from the story about poverty to the more meaningful story that has become Traditional Subjects.

I had traveled to Wounded Knee to photograph what the 1980 Census had identified as the poorest community in America. I expected to document hardship and stark statistics made visible. Instead, I found resilience, dignity, pride, and creativity that existed despite hardship, a deeper reality that reshaped both my work and my understanding.

One visit turned into many. I saw Lakota people reclaiming their heritage, reviving language, holding powwows, passing traditions to the next generation.

The project eventually caught the attention of PBS, leading to inclusion in a nationally broadcast program on contemporary photographers. A 1990 photograph I made of the Centennial Ride to Wounded Knee now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, part of its permanent collection.

Over time, my focus expanded beyond the Lakota. I traveled to other regions, meeting members of many Native nations who were keeping traditions alive through art, dance, activism, and storytelling. This ongoing work became my ongoing series, Traditional Subjects.

I don’t claim to speak for Native cultures. I will always be an outsider. But I hope my photographs, shaped by listening, learning, and respect, honor the people and heritage they portray.

In the posts that follow, I’ll share the stories behind the images above, and many others, with the hope of deepening understanding of Native lives and culture.

Website: Traditional Subjects