This man was a Native American from the Assinoboine tribe in Northern Montana. I photographed him many times in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood during the mid-1970s. He had stoic features that looked as though they were chiseled out of stone. This is ironic.
The Assinoboine people were part of the Sioux nation that inhabited most of the Northern Great Plains. The tribe was sometimes called the “stone Sioux” because the Assiniboine primarily cooked with heated stones.
I’m sure all of that was far from this man’s mind. He confided in me once that missed Montana, but needed the work he found in Chicago. Today, there are only approximately 3000 members of the tribe left. Uptown during the 1970s had a large Native American population, but they have largely dispersed throughout Chicago now.
