“Look I caught another one!”

The squeaky voice of a 5-year-old Eastern Shoshone girl named Kamiry was almost unbearably cute. She beamed at me as she held up another leafy stick dangling from her deerhair caddis. I never claimed to be good at teaching people to catch fish. Kamiry didn’t seem to mind.

Kamiry led me, hand in hand, through the willow shrubs along the banks of the perfectly sinuous St. Lawrence Creek in western Wyoming. In her other hand, she clenched my 5-weight. One ponytail and two pink butterfly clips held back her long hair as she bounced toward the next bend in the creek. She is an explosion of personality, never running out of stories to tell. At 5 years old, she’s learning how to get fresh with her mom and fine-tuning her cheeky, unimpressed looks. That I could help her with.

We were in the heart of the Wind River Indian Reservation—a place often maligned by media. In 2012, The New York Times published a hit piece about the place, detailing the “brutal crimes” that “plagued” the reservation. The piece was met with an overwhelming rebuttal. Tribal members, including high school students, hit back with op-eds defending their home and the work their community does to heal its ills. In 2013, Business Insider published Robert Johnson’s photo essay about the “Notorious Wind River Indian Reservation.” In it, he referred to the reservation as “the most dramatic and unbalanced place I’ve ever been,” calling its inhabitants “forgotten tribes.” Johnson propped up an apparent poverty fetish with incendiary captions for his grim photo series that depicts only brutality and violence.

According to Art Lawson, director of Shoshone & Arapaho Fish & Game, until very recently, if you were driving from Denver to Yellowstone National Park, Google Maps would route you all the way around the reservation, even though driving through it cuts nearly an hour off the trip. Lawson also said you’d be sorely mistaken to follow Google’s directions. “We’re better than Yellowstone,” he says. And he isn’t kidding.

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