Dog Bless America

In 2011, the photographer Naomi Harris rescued an abandoned shih tzu named Maggie from an Indian reservation in Canada. “On the res, she was covered in mud and ticks,” Harris told me. “I was going to drop her off at the Humane Society, and, on my way there, I put her in this bucket in the front seat and she stared at me while we drove for hours.” After Harris decided to apply for American citizenship, last year, she brought Maggie with her on a road trip across the United States, which she undertook in preparation for her citizenship exam. Since March, the pair have logged more than twenty-nine thousand miles. Harris documented her travels in a visual diary on Instagram and hopes to compile her portraits of Maggie into a book called “Dog Bless America.” “I didn’t just rescue Maggie,” she says. “She rescued me, too.”

All photographs by Naomi Harris.

A previous version of this post said that Harris rescued Maggie in 2012, and that they began travelling across the U.S. in July.