The Seventh Generation: Images Of The Lakota Today

by David Seals, Katrin Freisager

On December 29, 1890, over two hundred unarmed Lakota (Sioux) Indians were killed by the United States cavalry at Wounded Knee. The massacre sealed the fate of a whole people. Black Elk, the great medicine man, prophesied that strength would not return to his people until seven generations had passed. The time has come. Swiss-born photographer Katrin Freisager's outsider status allowed her three years of unrestricted insight into the contemporary life, beliefs, and landscape of the Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock reservations in South Dakota. Her evocative and atmospheric portraits of the people, the land and the animals, the talismans and sacred spaces, segue from gritty poverty to soaring prairie sky, weaving a beguiling narrative of mysticism, beauty, and the American West with the despairing conditions of dependency and marginalization on the government-issued reservation. Freisager conducts several interviews with her portrait subjects, further illuminating the hopes, thoughts, dreams, and desires of the inheritors of the prophecy.

Hardcover

Published December 15, 2004