“You’re American now; that’s all that matters.” This was the response a young John Willis received from his grandfather, Nathan, when he would ask questions about their family’s history. His grandparents’escape from Eastern Europe when they were young made for memories better left untouched.
It wasn’t until Willis began photographing the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, North Dakota, in the early-1990s that he began to feel the emptiness his grandfather’s off-handed dismissal engendered. Introduced to the subject by his friend, Eugene Reddest Comes Out First of the same tribe, a selection of his now decades-long documentation of Indigenous American life and culture is currently on view through March 15 at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Massachusetts.
In conjunction with Willis’ photographs are two other exhibitions — Austin Bryant’s “Where They Remain,” a portion of which were shown at Boston’s Panopticon Gallery in 2025; and “Manifest Destiny,” which grapples with the moral and ethical repercussions born out of the infamous 19th century policy that guided American western expansion. All three exhibitions stand as invaluable contributions to the museum’s four-part sestercentennial programing, “State of Our Union.”