Trevor Decker Cohen wrote:

The field of urbanism puts the European city on a pedestal. There’s a sense that if we could just paste the walkable streets of Paris onto our strip malls and highways, we’d create paradise in America. What’s lost in this conception is the wisdom from thousands of years of Indigenous placemaking in North America.

On a road trip to interview farmers and ranchers for a book about people-powered solutions to climate change, I had a chance to see a Native American vision for the future of towns and cities.

My visit began in a gravel parking lot in Porcupine, South Dakota. Here on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in one of the poorest counties in the country, an unlikely revolution had transpired. Andrew “Andy” Ironshell welcomed me at the door of a portable building. He was the acting comms director for Thunder Valley CDC: A non-profit, Native American-led real estate developer.

Halfway into our conversion, he took out a book of photographs that depicted life on the reservation. “This is the competing narrative,” he said. “We call it poverty porn.” The book, which came out of Aaron Huey’s National Geographic assignment, showed the world images of life on Pine Ridge. “He got all these great pictures of real life on the reservation. But of course, it shows the harshness.”

There is truth to that harshness. Unemployment still hovers around 70 percent. Life expectancy is 48 years for men and 52 years for women. Many residents live in the equivalent of FEMA trailers with 15 people to a home. Yet statistics and images only tell one side of the story. Organizations like Thunder Valley reveal another.