2012 Knight Fellow Aaron Huey was recently named winner of the National Press Photographers Association prestigious 2013 Cliff Edom “New America” Award.

The honor recognizes his work on “In the Shadow of Wounded Knee,” National Geographic magazine’s cover story in August 2012. This multimedia project includes a story, photographs, audio interviews and an interactive storytelling platform that let’s the people who live on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation tell their story in their own words.

As a photojournalist who had been working on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for nearly a decade, Huey was frustrated at his inability to capture the complexity of the Oglala Lakota story, and the effects of more than a century of relocations, broken government promises and heartache. An envelope full of letters from high school students at the Red Cloud Indian School after they had seen a photo story of his on Pine Ridge in 2009 prompted Huey to begin exploring a different side of the Reservation and different ways for its story to be told.

Pine Ridge is 16 miles from Wounded Knee Creek, where in 1890 some 150 Indians were massacred in the last of the American Indian Wars. The Oglala Lakota are one of seven tribes that make up the Great Sioux Nation. The majority of the Oglala live in Pine Ridge, the eighth-largest Native American reservation in the United States.