The US cavalry killed more than 200 Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890. British photographer Kalpesh Lathigra met the tribal leaders, teenagers and activists living there today – and found a landscape still haunted by death

There are two touchstones for Kalpesh Lathigra’s Lost in the Wilderness: Dee Brown’s epic alternative history of the American west, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Alec Soth’s evocative photobook, Sleeping By the Mississippi. The first recounted that history from the Native American point of view and, in the process, highlighted the full extent of the long genocide of America’s native people. The second shows how documentary photography can be so aesthetically and formally beautiful as to blur the boundaries between deep observation and art.

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“I was a full-on news journalist, who knew nothing about American colour – Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and the rest – until I walked into an exhibition of Soth’s work in 2004,” says Lathigra, who was born and raised in east London. “It was like my eyes just opened. I immediately started thinking of new ways to tell stories with images. Around the same time a friend gave me a copy of Dee Brown’s book, and that was another eye-opener. The idea for Lost in the Wilderness came soon afterwards, and I’ve been working on it ever since.”

The book revisits the scene of the Wounded Knee massacre, the pivotal moment when, in 1890, the US Calvary killed more than 200 men, women and children at a camp on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Lathigra spent several months travelling through the region and meeting local people – tribal elders, teenagers, activists. “I used a medium-format camera, which makes you work more slowly. I wanted the images to be ambiguous and yet have a lingering power, not least because that’s the effect the place had on me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Quietly intense … a portrait from Kalpesh Lathigra’s Lost in the Wilderness

His landscapes often seem to carry echoes of the past, whether a blood-smeared field after a buffalo hunt or the often deliberately low-key monuments that mark the site of massacres. Throughout, the big, wide skies and flat plains of the Dakotas and Wyoming lend an elemental melancholy to the images. “It sometimes seemed to me that it was haunted by death. It’s not just to do with what happened there historically, but the prevalence of youth suicides and car crashes among young Native Americans. I wanted to capture some of that rawness and the lack of hope as well as the dignity of the people, but in a quiet, reflective way.”

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Lost in the Wilderness moves between the intimate and the subtlety symbolic. It captures the reality of life on the reservations – the flat, barren land, drab rooms, careworn faces – as well as some moments of dark irony: the Custer Motel in the town of Custer in South Dakota, a wall in a Dairy Queen fast-food cafe covered in photographs of John Wayne as a cowboy. “I went there with some Lakota elders en route to Little Big Horn. It was both a surreal and intensely uncomfortable moment.” He has mischievously titled the image Marion, Dairy Queen, Custer, the “Marion” referring to Wayne’s distinctly non-macho given name.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deliberately low-key … the grave of a child who survived the Wounded Knee massacre in a picture from Kalpesh Lathigra’s Lost in the Wilderness

Throughout, certain images draw you back: a portrait of an elder called Vincent Brings Plenty, standing alone on what looks like a suburban chalet park; the stark functionalism of St John’s Church, Oglala, where the few survivors of Wounded Knee were taken by Christian missionaries; the grave of Lost Bird, who, as a child, survived the massacre, protected by her mother’s fallen body, and whose remains were returned there a century later.

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In one quietly intense portrait, two young men in hoodies stand by some gas cylinders, their aged eyes speaking of resilience and lives lived on the periphery. “I always identified with the so-called Red Indians in cowboys-and-indians films as a child because of my Indian – as in the subcontinent – heritage,” says Kalpesh, “and because I was seen as somehow different, even in multicultural London. But I was shocked to encounter the casual racism that attends these young men’s lives. More than once I heard people say of the Native American communities, ‘Why don’t they get with the programme?’ The inference was that they need to fit in, be less different and somehow more American. The irony seemed lost on the people who said it, but it always made me angry in my gut.”

That anger no doubt runs through Lost in the Wilderness, but beyond that is the deeper narrative of a people surviving, and retaining their culture and traditions – their way of life – against the odds.

• Lost in the Wilderness is available at kalpeshlathigra.com, price £35.