Description: Indian Country is a major work of photojournalism: a beautiful, affecting, and candid portrait of Native American life today. Acclaimed photographer Gwendolen Cates, who has been going to Indian Country since she was a child, traveled around the country photographing the people of many different tribes and nations and the lands in which they live -- from the Tlingit of Alaska to the Navajo of the Southwest, from the Seneca in New York State to the Miccosukee in Florida, from Yurok to Cheyenne, Ojibwe to Hualapai.

To gaze at these photographs is to take a journey through another world altogether. We see the classic images of elders and medicine men, children in traditional regalia, tepees set against the massive sky and epic landscapes. But Cates's photographs never romanticize, portraying instead the range of the Indian experience as it really is at this moment in time. Cates's subjects are families and children, leaders and entertainers, activists and urban professionals, even teenagers who have taken up hip-hop culture. These people speak in their own words throughout; their voices give additional insight into a reality few of us know.

This book is a powerful document, and remarkable in its scope. Cates has photographed traditional people in remote areas, celebrities such as Robbie Robertson and Val Kilmer, and even gained access to Leavenworth Prison to photograph Leonard Peltier. Her focus is always the humanity of her subjects. As a result, her book truly becomes a portrait of a people. This is a project of enormous ambition, one not attempted since Edward Curtis one hundred years ago, and it is destined to become a classic and essential book.

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