Tribal Land Bucks

In Pursuit of Whitetails and Muleys.

- Jack Ballard

A brightening halo in the eastern sky portended the sun- rise. Lungs heaving, I had just crested a bony ridge in an amalgam of coulees, contorted gouges in a flowing landscape dotted with dark junipers. Our position was beneath an obelisk of slowly eroding sandstone and flaky, bone colored soil. Joe, my hunting companion, attached a spotting scope to a tripod. Leon and Tommy, our guides, turned their binoculars toward the rising sun in search of deer.

In the heart of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, I had known my native guides for less than two hours, but it had already been a heart-warming experience. Their arrival at the Lakota Prairie Ranch Resort, a non-descript but decently clean motel burdened by a moniker too opulent for its dwellings, occurred at what seemed the middle of the night. A spare tire had been sitting in the rear seat of Leon’s work truck, my perch for the day. Joe jogged into his room for a towel to throw over the tire’s greasy outline on the vinyl. A young, wiry Lakota lad slumped in the seat opposite me, a hooded sweatshirt pulled over his head, an apparently empty but impotent energy drink cradled in his listless fingers. There are no “good mornings” or introductions, save a “How’s it going?” from Joe. Leon popped the pickup into reverse. We backed across the gravel parking lot then headed down the highway.

A half-hour into the drive I was reflecting on Native America, on Indian reservations where visiting Anglos with cultural blinders can be put-off by a seeming lack of social decorum, but where humor and hospitality are seldom in short supply. For over a decade, I’ve interacted with Tommy and Leon’s counterparts on the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Reservations in Montana as a photographer. While waiting for an opportune moment to break the slightly uneasy silence, Leon beat me to the punch.