Danish Photographer Gives Cameras To Pine Ridge Kids
PINE RIDGE, S.D. (WCCO) -- Five hundred miles west of the Twin Cities is the sprawling Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It is one of the poorest and most depressed parts of America, where poverty is deep, alcoholism affects eight of 10 families and 70 percent of its children never finish school.
It's also a place where Lyle Dillon, his wife and five children call home.
"It ain't much but it's something," Dillon said, as he leads WCCO reporter Bill Hudson and photojournalist Dave Wertheimer through the family's small home.
The home sits among a handful of others near the small town of Batesland, S.D. A local mini-mart and a few other scattered buildings, some abandoned, dot the wide-open prairie.
But this is where Dillon and his family scrape out a living, and to them, it's the only life they've known.
Dillon admits that life here is littered with danger, saying, "There's a lot of alcohol, you name it, drugs and all that stuff. It's kinda hard for me."
It's also hard for his 9-year-old daughter, Donna Jo. She's a little girl with a big job -- often left home alone to care for her two younger sisters.
Donna Jo walks past the shell of what was the family's van and recalls the day her younger sibling started it on fire.
"She burned the van in a fire cause she knows how to start lighters," said Donna Jo.
Accidents, alcohol and suicide contribute to Pine Ridge's average life expectancy of just 48 years. Even kids like Donna Jo can sense the pain and the struggle here.
Looking around, Donna Jo reflects, "once it's school it's fun -- and once its vacation, I hate it!"
But what she does like is capturing her sense of place on film. Holding her fingers in the shape of a box, Donna Jo says, "I know how to make a camera, look it!"
She's been photographing life on the reservation through a creative project brought to Pine Ridge by Christia Jermiin-Dieserud.
"I am from Denmark, I live in Denmark, Scandinavia," Jermiin-Dieserud explained.
A few years ago she was visiting the Black Hills and heard about the poverty gripping the people living on the nearby Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The Danish photojournalist was immediately intrigued by what she was learning and felt compelled to visit.
That's where she met Donna Jo and the many other children with stories to tell. Jermiin-Dieserud decided to let the children tell their own stories.
"And my idea was to see the world through the children's eyes," she said.
It's grown into a photographic workshop she calls, "Heart of the Old West." It is a photographic exhibit that taps in a very powerful way both the pride and the poverty of Pine Ridge.
Jermiin-Dieserud does that by giving children like Donna Jo simple, little disposable cameras and letting them loose to capture life as they live it!
She gives the kids simple instructions on matters of composition and subject.
"Something that means something to you or pictures telling a story," Jermiin-Dieserud explained.
And some of the most telling are taken by 9-year old, Donna Jo. In one image is her self portrait, standing outside the family home. Others capture the breathtaking beauty of the prairie landscape or the stark contrast of abandonment.
In either case, it's a "visual" language that can be understood whether Dakota or Dane. These innocent, often powerful images of family and friends, hardship and hope.
As Jermiin-Dieserud explains, "I think you should see the pictures and make up your mind yourself ... They are not trying to focus on the ugliness or the poverty, they are just picturing life as they see it."
It is a life that's caught between keeping true to a culture and finding a way out. That is Lyle Dillon's dream for his picture snapping little girl.
Dillon chokes up and says, "I will always love her -- she's a good girl!"
Regardless of what develops from the children's photography project, Jermiin-Dieserud is touching lives and tapping young talents.
"It will show the kids that they are talented and that their artworks are something they can be proud of," she said.
And somewhere along the way, it is giving this special nine-year old a reason to look beyond dirt roads and desolation -- past a place where hope too often ends.
If you'd like to see the children's photographic exhibition or learn more about the "Heart of the Old West" project, you can see it at http://heartoftheoldwest.org/.
