The Complexities of “Territories”: Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

I don’t know where to begin.  As I was reading, listening, and watching, so many thoughts flashed into my head.  My apparent lack of knowledge about Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and just the history in general regarding the United States and Indian relations was one of the things I realized.  Frankly, I must admit I had not given a lot of thought about Indian reservations prior to this assignment.  I guess I had a romantic view of how they were connected harmoniously with nature and were happy and at peace.  Though I might have continued believing that if we had just looked at George Catlin’s landscape portraits, I obviously had a real “enlightenment” when it came to Aaron Huey’s photography and especially his Ted Talk.  Now, I’m not going to keep on going on and on about how Huey’s photography and Fuller’s article and podcast made me realize I had been living in my own little world, but I wanted to let you know where I was coming from, and I kind of imagine I’m not alone there.  Nevertheless, what I’d like to do in this blog is connect some of our secondary readings to Huey’s pictures in order to see the connections to territory.

First, in Brenner and Elden’s article, they discuss Henri Lefebvre and how he discusses territory as a space—Lefebvre especially discusses “abstract space”—that is political, visionary (or “political imaginaries”), and violent (358-59).  Though the territory of the Black Hills is not an abstract space, I think these three aspects are worth looking at.  Brenner and Elden go on to point out that the notion of land could be understood as “the articulation between the nation-state and its territory” (363).  This is a crude summary, but I can’t go into too much detail in this blog.  I think the politics of territory is one of the key ways to look at Huey’s photography.  After all, Huey employs his photography of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation as a way of making a political statement: “Give the Black Hills back to the Lakota.  What they do with them is none of your business.”  The “territory” of the Black Hills becomes a political issue.  Interestingly, Mount Rushmore, with our forefathers looking out over the land, seems “visionary.”  Yet, as I listened to on the National Geographic website from a girl about “Faces-Do Not Worship,” she points out that this place people travel to has become basically a joke since it wasn’t even the Americans’ land to start out with.  I don’t know if I should even point out the violence aspect tied to this land since we’ve all read and listened to the same texts.

I’d also like to quickly mention “The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790-1860” and how Roediger points out that political theorists connect our forefathers’ claim to “the pursuit of happiness” to the “pursuit of property” (581).  I think it is interesting if we look at the Black Hills as property that our forefathers “pursued” in the hopes of obtaining happiness through financial prosperity and how the Indians view this property as a part of their heritage.  I realize that I need to wrap up my blog post, so I’m just going to end by saying that I think the complexities between property and pursuing happiness is an interesting way of looking at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the Black Hills.