Designed to Be Red: Native American & Indigenous Poster Works

Priceless Oil, c. 1920

Henri de Laurencin (Dates Unknown)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This early 20th-century advertisement for oil transforms Indigenous identity into corporate conquest. The visual conceit is not unique, however, as it echoes George Ford’s 1893 “Cover the Earth” logo for Sherwin-Williams showing a paint can pouring red paint over the globe. The French text here promises eternal youth for engines: “Motorists! Here is Priceless-Oil. Use it!…and your engines will always be young.”

• Created as the Osage Nation was experiencing unprecedented oil wealth—and the systematic murder of its people by corporate profiteers and private individuals for their oil rights—points to the global obsession with the Indigenous American connection to this natural resource. The Native figure is both conqueror and conquered: he wields an axe while serving as a corporate avatar, pouring petroleum across continents he does not possess. This casting positions Indigenous peoples as willing agents of the industries that were orchestrating the extraction of Native resources, destroying their environment, their lives, and their livelihoods.
• The Art Deco style of this design wraps ecological destruction in an aspirational aesthetic, selling not just motor oil but also a lifestyle defined by endless consumption. By harnessing Native imagery to glorify petroleum as actual Native people were being killed for oil wealth, Laurencin’s design epitomizes the keystone of extractive marketing: the use of those most harmed by industrial progress to sell its promise of a modern future.

Give It Back?, 2023

New Red Order [Jackson Polys (b. 1976, Tlingit), Adam Khalil (b. 1988, Ojibwe, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), and Zack Khalil (b. 1991, Ojibwe, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians)] with Riley Hooker (b. 1982) and Dylan Clancy (b. 1987)

Gift of New Red Order, Poster House Permanent Collection

• New Red Order also references Sherwin-Williams’s 1893 “Cover the Earth” logo, converting it from a capitalist tool to one that challenges the legacies of colonialism. Instead of paint spreading across continents, red (the color of Indigenous resistance) blankets a globe, transforming it into an apple, a natural symbol of rebirth.
• This poster was created for The World’s UnFair, a multimedia public art project presented by CreativeTime in Queens, New York, in 2023 proposing the inverse of the historic World’s Fair model, which typically dehumanized Indigenous and other non-European cultures as it celebrated colonial plunder. In this installation, audiences were invited to participate in a future freed from colonial power structures, represented in this poster by the number for a hotline that people can call to learn more about the Land Back movement. 
• Land Back is an ongoing movement in which Indigenous peoples strive for the return of their ancestral lands and control over territories that were taken through colonization. Its goal is to provide Native communities with the power to govern, protect, and make decisions about these traditional lands. The term was coined in 2018 by Arnell Tailfeathers (Kainai, Blackfoot Confederacy) in satirical social media posts; NDN Collective—founded by Nick Tilsen (Oglala Lakota)—launched the formal LANDBACK Campaign on Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2020 following protests at Mount Rushmore, building on the Yellowhead Institute’s foundational Land Back Red Paper (2019).
• The poster operates through reversals: where Sherwin-Williams showed the earth covered in its product, New Red Order asks whether the colonizers will return the earth they have buried to its natural state. The question mark means that the point of engagement becomes an invitation rather than a militant demand, one that offers them a role in mutual survival rather than continued occupation.

LIFE Magazine, December 1967

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• This issue of LIFE magazine from 1967 focused on a surge in American fascination with Native culture. Under the subtitle “Return of the Red Man,” it presented various articles covering everything from diaries that documented the engagement of 19th-century Jesuits with specific tribes to the recent founding of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While the writing predictably reflects the biases and misconceptions of its time, the publication introduced a wide swath of American readers to the diversity within Indigenous culture and its history. 
• This spread features the IAIA student band The Jaggers, mentioned in a nearby poster. From left, they are Alfred Young Man, Cree [Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation]); Rosemary Peas (Mescalero Apache); Loren Moore (Oneida Nation/Chaticks Si Chaticks [Pawnee]); Dennis Stover (Athabascan); and John Grits (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma).

Anniversary of the National Museum of the American Indian, 2009

Ryan Red Corn (b. 1979, Osage Nation)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• The geometric and natural motifs presented in this poster reference a flat style of painting and illustration developed by the Kiowa Six, a group of early 20th-century Indigenous artists based in Oklahoma who devised a visual vocabulary of solid colors and minimal, detailed scenes. 
• While the composition might appear abstract to many viewers, each element in it has a “word equivalent”—a visual language in which each motif has a historic meaning. Here, ribbons represent the Osage River and the triangular forms reference lightning.
• In his poster for the 20th anniversary of the National Museum of the American Indian, Ryan Red Corn—a comedian with the sketch comedy group The 1491s and a writer for the celebrated Native-focused television series Reservation Dogs—draws on what he calls these “legacy languages.” His graphic decisions demonstrate how tradition evolves as he uses historic visual idioms to create something new, demonstrating that Native design heritage still offers dynamic systems of communication.

Make The World Better, c. 2012

Ryan Red Corn (b. 1979, Osage Nation) and Ashley Richards (b. 1987, Osage Nation/Otoe)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Ashley Richards originally designed the central turtle motif in this poster as a logo for a Native affinity group at the University of California, Los Angeles. When the organization decided not to use the motif, Richards and Ryan Red Corn expanded upon it, incorporating it in a poster that celebrates the idea of creating a better world. 
• This updated composition features a turtle swimming through space, a direct reference to the creation story shared by some Northeastern Woodlands Native tribes in which a giant turtle’s back becomes the foundation for Turtle Island—now known as North America—after Sky Woman, a celestial being, falls from the heavens. To assist her, animals dove into the water to bring up mud that she then spread on the turtle’s back to make the land, from which sprang all living things. 
• Red Corn and Richards translate this ancient story into contemporary graphic language, including traditional Osage ribbonwork patterns alongside imagery that carries distinct meanings across tribal traditions but that speaks collectively to interconnection, guidance, and balance. When combined, these symbols echo the original creation myth while asking the viewer to imagine a future in which all living things work together to build and care for a better world. 
• Buffalo Nickel Creative is an Indigenous-owned creative agency founded by Ryan Red Corn and based in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, on the Osage Nation Reservation. The studio operates as both a full-service advertising agency and as a film production company, with clients including Nike, the National Museum of the American Indian, and Paramount. The poster was created, displayed, and distributed on the reservation as part of the studio’s broader mission to generate positive, empowering imagery for Native communities—work that Red Corn describes as “social maintenance” through design.

Light Show, 1967

Bennie Buffalo [Bennie Franklin Buffalo/Benjamin Buffalo, Sr.] (1948–94, Southern Tsitsistas/Suhtai [Cheyenne])

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Founded as a high school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1962, the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) was born during the same era as the American Indian Movement, a national grassroots movement addressing numerous systemic injustices against Indigenous peoples. For more than 60 years, the IAIA has functioned not only as a place of education but also as a gathering space and as a beacon for Native artists to claim contemporary art as Indigenous territory.
• In this poster, created to promote a school event and light show, Bennie Buffalo uses the warped motifs of psychedelic art to suggest an eye staring directly at the viewer. Composed out of negative space, the iris and retina are established by the absence of ink, transforming typography into vision itself.
• This design stands in sharp contrast to the photographic exactness Buffalo would later champion in his paintings of Southern Tsitsistas/Suhtai life. Both styles, however, share the same goal: to document Indigenous reality on its own terms. Here, that is Native students in 1967 claiming countercultural style as their own—not as escapism but as another language for vision and community. The poster demonstrates how Native artists could be experimental and contemporary, presenting their visual histories in dialogue with American alternative culture.

For Indians Only/Light Show, 1967

Alfred Young Man (b. 1948, Cree [Chippewa Cree Indians of the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation])

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• This poster was created through a split-fountain printing technique in which multiple inks are laid across a screen and then pressed through it onto the paper by a squeegee, resulting in a blended rainbow effect. When combined with shape-shifting letterforms, it becomes a typical example of psychedelic design. Unlike the other posters for light shows at IAIA, this one also promotes an Indigenous student band, The Jaggers (of which Alfred Young Man was a member), in knocked-out type (lettering where the word is formed out of the negative space of the paper rather than through an outline), supported by two stylized human figures.
• While a student at IAIA, Young Man defied the expectation that he would focus on miniature painting, a style of art practiced by most of his colleagues at the school. Instead, he painted on large canvases measuring six by eight feet. His passion led him to study painting at graduate level in London; later, in 1997, he received his PhD in anthropology from Rutgers University in New Jersey. His work and writing often explore contemporary Indigenous issues, culture, and politics from a Native perspective.
• The word “Indian” has a complicated and charged history. It was first used by settlers as a sweeping term to refer to all Native peoples, thereby ignoring distinct tribal identities. It was also used pejoratively to imply inferiority. At the same time, it is a word that appears in numerous legal treaties, documents, and laws, including the U.S. Constitution, and therefore carries federally recognized weight. During the Red Power and American Indian movements, some Indigenous people reclaimed the term as a political statement of solidarity. Today, its acceptance varies widely among individuals and communities, many of whom prefer their specific tribal names or broader terms like “Native American” or “Indigenous.”

Light Show, 1968

Lawrence “Ulaaq” Ahvakana (b. 1946, Iñupiaq)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Light shows were popular within the psychedelic scene and were often held in conjunction with concerts. The fact that the IAIA presented at least three light shows during the late 1960s points to the students’ serious interest in wider American youth culture; they were able to embrace their individual Native identities while exploring their relationship with contemporary popular culture, making it their own.

I Really Like the Way You Respect Native American Rights, 2025

Anna Tsouhlarakis (b. 1977, Diné [Navajo Nation]/Creek/Greek)

Courtesy of the Artist

• This banner is part of an ongoing series by the artist Anna Tsouhlarakis called The Native Guide Project. Started in 2019, it features phrases typeset in Helvetica Bold (chosen for its visual weight and perceived authority) on both billboards and social media posts to confront stereotypes about Native American culture and life. 
• Here, the statement weaponizes politeness: the compliment can be read as a sarcastic accusation against those who do not actually respect Native American rights. Like her other messages, including, “It’s great how you acknowledge that Native Americans are still here” and “It may be called Columbus but it’s still Native Land,” the text forces viewers to question their own positions on these issues and ideas. The reader might identify as the “respectful” person being mocked, the Indigenous person exhausted by hollow acknowledgment—or occupy a place between the two.

Umbilicus: Indigena Dialogus/Defining the Great Mystery, 2001

Bob Haozous (b. 1943, Chiricahua Apache)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Sponsored by the Native American Arts Alliance, Chiricahua Apache scholar Dr. Nancy Mithlo’s Umbilicus was exhibited at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. One of nine Native-focused exhibitions she has brought to this prestigious global art event, it featured Indigenous American artists not as ethnographic subjects but as philosophers of existence. 
• The exhibition took its title from the Latin word for navel—the point where life is sustained and connection begins. For the six participating artists—Richard Ray Whitman (Yuchi-Muscogee [Muscogee Nation]); Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo); Darren Vigil Gray (Jicarilla Apache); Gabriel Lopez-Shaw/gwils boha (Pyramid Lake Paiute); Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache); and Sherwin Bitsui (Diné [Navajo Nation])—this central bond was neither geographic nor nation-based but deeply personal, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land understood to be as vital and irreducible as the umbilical cord linking mother to child. 
• This poster promoting the exhibition features a pixelated background of cracked, arid earth, representing the exploitation of Indigenous land since colonial contact. The frame is made up of multiethnic variations on Chief Wahoo, the mascot of what was then the Cleveland Indians baseball team (now the Cleveland Guardians), emphasizing the ongoing harm to Native identity and suggesting that the logic of racial caricature is never isolated to one group. 
• The central composition in this poster highlights two nearly nude female mannequins wearing plastic headdresses, presenting symbols of Native ceremony as costume. Between them is a lifesize figure of the iconic movie cowboy John Wayne, while an array of nude women are nailed to the background, possibly referencing the sexual assault and murder of Native women.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 2019 

Kevin Coochwytewa (b. 1976, Isleta Pueblo/Hopi)

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• Designed for Indigenous Peoples’ Day (held annually in the United States on the second Monday in October), this poster features a central motif of three geometric “seeds” representing corn kernels. The circles that surround them are meant to reflect a sense of growth and balance as well as prayers, songs, and hopes that the community puts upon and within them. Those small seeds are then nourished by the sun, sky, clouds, rain, and lightning, as depicted in white in traditional Pueblo and Hopi line drawings. The colors oscillate from day to night and from dry to wet. All of these factors work in harmony to create the small cornstalk in the lower register of the design, a symbol of cultural pride. 
• Kevin Coochwytewa acknowledges that his Isleta Pueblo and Hopi heritage has inspired a lifelong appreciation for art and design. The fact that he was born into cultures with strong and meaningful connections to the land and community has shaped his thought processes and his work. His paternal grandmother named him Talwif’tiyo, which means “Lightning Boy” in Hopi. Kevin firmly believes that his name manifests his drive to create significant artistic work.

Domestic Spirit Animal, 2018

Leo Vicenti (b. 1985, Jicarilla Apache)

Courtesy of the Artist

• In this poster, Leo Vicenti uses dark humor to comment on the commodification of ancient Indigenous spiritual practices by contemporary American wellness enthusiasts. The format reflects that of the ubiquitous grocery store signs, typically hand painted or cheaply printed, that highlight the day’s low-priced specials. Rather than promote bananas or ground bison, however, it advertises spirit animals, sacred guides that choose a person through dreams and visions—here reduced to $3.49 per pound.
• In many Native traditions, including Vincenti’s own Apache heritage, spirit animals are messengers and carriers of ancestral wisdom that cannot be bought or sold. They emerge through ceremony, patience, and a relationship with the natural world.
• Through this fake advertisement, Vicenti criticizes American culture’s extractive relationship to Native spirituality, one in which it is presumed that everything, including the sacred, can be purchased. 
• While the series originated in 2018 around the campus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Vicenti continues to add images to it as an act of living protest and cultural commentary. His most recent public intervention occurred in February 2025.

Marvel Celebrates Native American Heritage Month, 2020

Jeffrey Veregge (1974–2024, Port Gamble Band of S’Klallam Indians)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Commissioned by Marvel in honor of Native American Heritage Month and displayed in comic-book stores around the nation, this poster transforms Marvel’s heroes from an Indigenous perspective, reinventing Iron Man, Moonstar, Spider-Man, Black Widow, Captain America, Black Panther, Thor, and the Incredible Hulk.
• Jeffrey Veregge called his aesthetic “Salish Geek” in reference to the Salish peoples who populate the Pacific Northwest. His visual language combines motifs from that group’s historic Coast Salish design with elements of pop culture, creating a modernized Pacific Northwest Native style.
• Veregge’s prolific work across Marvel Comics, IDW Publishing, Valiant Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and the imagery of other major publishers inserted a prominent Native presence into mainstream global pop culture. He supported Indigenous storylines like Marvel’s Red Wolf relaunch in 2015 (one of the earliest examples of a Native American superhero, first appearing in 1970) while demonstrating that Native visual languages could incorporate any story and any hero (rather than those specifically defined as Indigenous), as this poster shows.

Chá Neil Yee tliyéi Yéi inatì︠, HaaK̲u.oo g̲aag̲isa-nei X̮ì︠t (Stay Home/Save Our People), 2020

Crystal Worl (b. 1988, Tlingit/Deg Hit’an Athabascan) 

Private Collection, Turtle Island

Stay Home/Save Our People, 2020

Crystal Worl (b. 1988, Tlingit/Deg Hit’an Athabascan) 

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• These two posters feature Tlingit formline drawings (a style of Indigenous art used by tribes of the Pacific Northwest in which continuous, flowing lines are used to define forms) showing a figure with hands raised in front of a clan longhouse, a traditional communal dwelling that sheltered multiple generations. 
• The message presented in these posters, produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, speaks to centuries of health crises within Indigenous populations, from the many infectious diseases brought by Europeans during the colonial period to ongoing disparities around healthcare access. By instructing the reader to “stay home” to save lives, the posters stress that people should rely on their own community rather than outside forces for safety. 
• While these posters were seen and used by the members of numerous tribes, the incorporation of Tlingit in the first design highlights the importance of keeping alive Indigenous written and oral traditions. In this instance, by referencing an ancient language during a public emergency, the artist reminds readers of the power of their own groups to get through frightening and tragic situations.

Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House, 2021

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee)

Courtesy of the Artist

• This is one of four posters in a series created as part of Jeffrey Gibson’s monumental ziggurat-style sculpture of the same name; a preliminary model for it is shown in a nearby case. Each of these images incorporates traditional Indigenous design practices in new contexts, highlighting both the future and the past of these craft-based objects, and was meant to be affixed to the public sculpture. 
• Here, three doll-like beings evoke the “little people” found across Native folklore—helpful, mischievous, and sometimes malevolent creatures that inhabit the spaces between the seen and the unseen. Rather than being presented as tricksters or threats, each is described in a celebratory, joyful manner, with colorful, vibrating lines tracing their silhouettes and implying ecstatic, communal movement. 
• Made of ribbon, glass beads, brass bells, and precious stones, these plush spirits first appeared in Gibson’s 2021 exhibition It Can Be Said of Them, in which he explored ideas around LGBTQIA+ identity. He named them in Choctaw lusa hicha tohbi, humma hicha lvkna, and homakbi tvli.

Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House, 2021

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) and Dana Claxton (b. 1959, Hunkpapa Lakota [Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations])

Courtesy of the Artist

• This composition highlights three generations of Old Crow, a type of Yukon beadwork specific to the Vuntut Gwichin First Nation. These beaded legacies cascade across a female figure’s face and torso, emphasizing the time-honored artistry often carried by women within Native cultures.
• The central photograph is part of a 2019 series by Dana Claxton in which traditional materials like shell and coral are mixed with glass trade beads, each piece embodying stories, prayers, and family memory. Made in collaboration with Jeffrey Gibson, this image of cultural abundance, bold color, and movement (shown through blurred exposure) transforms a portrait of cultural inheritance into a declaration of Indigenous presence and power.
• By incorporating the very materials that European settlers saw as mere decoration and attempted to replace with Western commodities, this poster presents a narrative of an exuberant Native future. When faced with erasure, Native communities retained these materials as currency, ceremony, and identity. Here, joy comes from continuation itself, the knowledge that grandmothers’ hands guide granddaughters’ work.

Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House, 2021

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) and Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Diné [Navajo Nation]) 

Courtesy of the Artist

• Created in collaboration with the fiber artist Eric-Paul Riege, this poster presents ambiguous soft forms in gentle, inviting colors. The shapes could be interpreted as magnified details of beaded necklaces, columns of frybread, or even architecturally stacked blankets. In any case, the composition intimates gestures of Diné artistry into the monumental. 
• Frybread is a flat bread made from wheat flour, water, and salt that is fried in oil. It was created by Natives using government rations during forced relocations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries when they could not access their traditional foods. Today, it is eaten plain or with toppings and serves as the base for Indian tacos. The bread represents the trauma of colonization and displacement as well as the ability of Indigenous peoples to survive and adapt under extreme hardship.
• The rhythmic, linear patterning most directly evokes jewelry tables at Indigenous markets, where families have long traded handmade beauty for necessities, blending economic survival with cultural persistence.
• Riege has asked: what if we made jewelry for giants? Here, that question becomes a celebration. These forms refuse to be small or apologetic—they stack and support each other with the same structural integrity found in Diné weaving, the same determined geometries found in traditional jewelry. The intense colors might represent the dichotomy between clay and turquoise, the sun and the sky. What might read as a commentary on commodification becomes an assertion of abundance—these traditions are too large to be contained, too powerful to be diminished.

Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House, 2021

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) and Luzene Hill (b. 1946, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians)

Courtesy of the Artist

• Gibson’s collaboration with Luzene Hill here highlights one of her fluid ink drawings, evoking a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, DNA strands, and ritual dance. Rainbow colors separated by black lines suggest stained glass or underlit disco floors while organic forms pulse with playful imprecision. 
• Hill’s work has long addressed trauma and violence against women and Indigenous cultures but this collaboration turns toward joy as resistance. The drawing’s repetitive, evolving shapes celebrate transformation and healing, spreading outward as they imply both a vulnerable and a strong Indigenous future.

Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House, 2020

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee)

Courtesy of the Artist

• This is a model of a larger public sculpture of the same name by Jeffrey Gibson. Originally part of the group exhibition Monuments Now, held in Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York, in 2020, the finished work was a 21-foot-tall ziggurat that confronted the viewer with technicolor patterns and posters on all sides. It was meant as a gesture of defiance as well as a critical assessment of traditional American values, pushing hypnotically rendered slogans like “The Future Is Present,” “Respect Indigenous Land,” and “In Numbers Too Big To Ignore.” 
• The tiered structure references the earthen architecture of Cahokia, the massive Mississippian metropolis that flourished near present-day St. Louis around 1100 CE. At that time, Cahokia was larger than London and covered more than 6 square miles with 120 mounds; it was a multicultural hub where more than 100 tribes gathered to trade, make treaties, and communicate in many languages.
• While honoring the past, Gibson’s sculpture also draws on from camp aesthetics; its elements are intentionally exaggerated for the sake of subversion. His title incorporates a line from Chicago house musician Mr. Fingers’s 1986 song “Can You Feel It,” linking the vibrant communal essence of queer nightlife with an ancient Indigenous gathering space. This melding of two seemingly different and opposed worlds reflects the Native understanding of time, one in which all things are present at once—with no beginning and no end.

We Are All Children of Mother Earth, 1990 

Larry J. DesJarlais, Jr. (b. 1945, Turtle Mountain Chippewa)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• This poster was created specifically for Native Americans living on reservations and trust lands. The tagline “We Are All Children of Mother Earth” operates on multiple levels, simultaneously speaking to a shared Indigenous worldview, the interconnectedness of all life, and collective responsibility for future generations. Within the context of the census, however, this message becomes strategic, reminding isolated communities that being counted benefits the entire community. 
• The design shows a young woman and an older man bundled together inside a silhouette of eagle feathers, each standing in for different tribes. Together, they represent the past and future of entire Native communities.
• Larry J. DesJarlais, Jr.’s original design was titled Generation Coup. A “coup” is a traditional Native practice of counting victories. By focusing on spiritual imagery and kinship, the poster reframes census participation as an act of cultural “coup counting” rather than one of governmental data gathering.

Name Your Tribe/Answer the Census, 1990

Lewis Nightingale (b. 1950) and Peggy Anakna (Dates Unknown, Suquamish)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Designed specifically for urban and off-reservation Natives, this poster featuring Peggy Anakna’s painting Indians addresses a challenge distinct from that of reservation outreach. Urban Natives often lack the community infrastructure and federal services available on tribal lands, making accurate counts even more critical for the allocation of resources. The message “We are all Brothers and Sisters but of different nations” reminds dispersed populations of their continuing kinship despite geographic separation. 
• Anakna’s decision to represent Native diversity in the form of silhouettes rather than of specific people allows viewers to envision themselves as part of this tapestry. It also emphasizes what is at stake: without being counted, unique individuals become part of an indistinguishable mass in the federal data and their particular needs become invisible to the systems that determine resources by numbers alone.

Let Our Voices Be Heard, 1990

David John (b. 1966, Diné [Navajo Nation])

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Census data determines congressional representation in the United States as well as the extent of federal funding for roads, housing, hospitals, job training, and human services—resources especially critical on reservations and for urban Natives who depend on these life-sustaining programs. The gathering of accurate counts has always been fraught, however, especially for Native communities that distrust government officials and federal policies because of past wrongdoing. Such inaccuracies result in significant undercounting, with wide disparities between tribal rolls and census tallies.
• The 1990 United States Census marked a turning point in the collection of Indigenous data. For the first time, the U.S. Census Bureau approached a Native organization, the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), which chose George Burdeau (Blackfeet Nation) to organize, develop, and implement a national marketing campaign. The IAIA created five posters along with public service announcements for television and radio, buttons, T-shirts, and flyers that spoke directly to Native communities in their own storytelling styles and visual languages.
• Selected as the 1990 census campaign’s kickoff and general awareness poster, this design was unveiled to President George H. W. Bush in the White House Treaty Room in the spring of 1989. For Native participants, this choice of location was painfully significant. The Treaty Room was where the U.S. government had formalized its promises to other nations. Between 1778 and 1871, the government signed approximately 370 treaties with Native nations; historians generally agree that virtually all of them were violated.
• David John’s composition shows figures known as Yei, Diné messengers who mediate between the human and the spirit worlds. This imagery avoids the “traditional” Native visual stereotypes that government officials might have expected, instead presenting celestial beings that might have meaning for anyone, anywhere—in an urban apartment or on a reservation. In many Diné traditions, Yei bring what is needed for survival and renewal. Here, that means a properly counted census and the resources it could engender for Native communities.

For Our Future/Alaska Natives—Be Counted, 1990

Lewis Nightingale (b. 1950) and Denise Wallace (b. 1957, Chugach Sugpiaq)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• This poster was specifically created for Alaska Natives—including the artist Denise Wallace’s own Sugpiaq (Alutiiq) people of the Kodiak Archipelago, Alaska Peninsula, and Prince William Sound—and acknowledges distinct arctic and subarctic communities. 
• The design features a composite image of two pieces of jewelry by Denise Wallace. Together, they form a great bird that spreads its wings over five Alaska Natives, all seen celebrating through creating, drumming, and dancing. The bird’s welcoming wings suggest both protection and expansion—Alaska Native communities growing stronger through accurate census counts and the return of resources to those who have historically belonged to this land.
• Wallace, widely recognized as one of the finest Native jewelers of the 20th century, makes intricate pieces in gold, silver, fossil ivory, and semiprecious stones that physically transform. Tiny doors swing open to reveal hidden figures; faces can be lifted to expose animals beneath. These mechanisms echo traditional Sugpiaq masks in which one face opens onto another—a way, as Wallace has said, of showing ”the transformation of the inner spirit of an animal, person, or object.”

Listen To The Drum/Raise Your Voice, 1990

Lewis Nightingale (b. 1950) and Jerry Ingram (b. 1941, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma/Cherokee)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Based on Jerry Ingram’s painting Calling the Eagles, this poster was created for all Native American audiences. While it allows for a range of interpretations depending on a tribe’s specific relationship to drumming, it primarily positions the drummer as a messenger and a modern mobilization tool, calling on all Native peoples beyond reservation boundaries to participate in the census.
• The flying eagles also have unique meanings specific to each tribe but they are most often seen as messengers between earth and sky. When considered in relation to the census, eagles further stand as symbols of the U.S. government; however, this design frames participation as cultural continuation rather than compliance. The drum calls for strategic visibility, using rhythm, like statistics, to ensure that resources flow back to communities. 
• Each poster in the census campaign is an exercise in both nuanced cultural understanding and self-representation—what spoke to reservation communities might not reach urban Natives; what worked for Southwest tribes might not connect with Great Lakes Natives. What they all shared, though, was the idea that being counted in the census was not capitulation to surveillance but a strategic act of sovereignty, claiming resources, asserting presence, and ensuring that Native communities received what was rightfully theirs.

Pagans in our Midst, 1980 

Private Collection, Turtle Island

Akwesasne Notes (vol. 6, no. 1), April 1974 

Private Collection, Turtle Island

How Democracy Came to St. Regis & The Thunderwater Movement, 1974

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• Founded in 1968 by Ernest Benedict at the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, Akwesasne Notes soon became the most influential Native American newspaper, reaching an audience far larger than its Mohawk community. The editors’ declared mission was “reuniting people with their community and their land base…resisting the exploitation of land, animal, water, and human beings.”
• More than just a newspaper, Akwesasne Notes served as a comprehensive Indigenous media infrastructure, publishing books, pamphlets, calendars, and posters that circulated across North America. By controlling production, distribution, and messaging, the Mohawk Nation demonstrated the right to document Indigenous struggles, share stories, and define its own visual language. Its poster series, sold through mail order, appeared in Native homes and community centers as well as at protest sites throughout the 1970s.
• These examples showcase the newspaper’s incredible breadth, including regular issues reporting on Indigenous resistance to colonial oppression worldwide, pamphlets on local governance, and books challenging colonial narratives. Akwesasne Notes did not just make images, it also built systems to disseminate them, creating a dynamic network of Native people speaking to other Native people without translation or mediation.

Develop Your Art Talent/Prepare for Your Career, 1971

Antonio “Tony” Mondragon (b. 1952, Taos Pueblo)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Printed by the Institute of American Indian Arts, this poster advertises 40 professional courses offered by the school, with tuition, room, and board covered for qualifying students. The bold capitalization of the phrases “ART TALENT” and “YOUR CAREER” centers artistic practice as a legitimate career path.
• Historically, the Bureau of Indian Affairs encouraged trade schools for Indigenous students as a means of assimilation into the wider American employment market. Here, however, it sponsored a poster promising tuition, room, and board for an education in art—a career path not often considered viable in the modern world. 
• The poster also notes that students are required to be “qualified Indian, Eskimo, [or] Aleut” to receive the listed benefits. Such language reflects blood quantum policies—a controversial colonial system that quantified Indigenous identity through fractional ancestry recorded in government documents rather than through culture or community belonging.
• Tony Mondragon’s design embraces both Western modernist aesthetics and traditional Indigenous motifs, incorporating a solitary buffalo and an eagle-feather blessing alongside Swiss Grid-style typography and clean lines. These choices assert that Native design belongs within the contemporary graphic canon as its own unique style, one with a rich, evolving history.

We Were Once A Strong And Proud Nation…Where Is Our Pride Now?, 1977

Sherwin Zephier (1957–2017, Yankton Sioux)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Designed for a student and staff workshop at the Institute of American Indian Arts, this poster addresses the devastating reality of alcoholism and alcohol abuse within Native communities—a problem introduced and exacerbated by colonial intervention dating back to the time of first contact with Europeans. According to a 2023 study in the scientific journal BMC Public Health, the age-adjusted mortality rate for alcohol-related liver disease among Native Americans and Alaska Natives increased from 27.2 to 88.4 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2020—more than tripling in two decades.
• The stark design and text reflect the poster’s bleak but powerful message. The determined Native man who rises with the sun over buffalo, teepees, and a scene of communal life is a sign of hope, one that stands in contrast to the figure with long, symbolic braids lying unresponsive beside a bottle marked “poison” as a larger face cries in the background. 
• The poster proposes healing as an extension of cultural pride, inviting youth and elders to confront the issue of alcoholism together and find a solution. By focusing on Native-led problem-solving, it rejects the “white savior” narrative often pushed on Indigenous communities while acknowledging internal struggles.

Wakanyeja kin wakanpi kin he un witaya naunji naunjinpi kte (Standing Together Because of the Children), 1989 

Martin Red Bear (b. 1947, Oglala/Sicangu Lakota [Rosebud Sioux Tribe])

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• This poster was created for the Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Committee at Piya Wiconi–Three Mile Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The design and accompanying text frame the prevention of domestic violence as an expression of Lakol Wicohan (the Lakota Way), rooted in Yuonihan (respect), Okiciyapi (mutual aid), and Tiwahe (family).
• Martin Red Bear illustrates three generations within a circular shield, watched over by an eagle. He draws on the visual language of ledger art (a style of narrative drawing) and other Plains graphic traditions, linking the historic culture of those living on the reservation to the prospect of community healing.
• The 1980s and ’90s witnessed periods of increased Native-led organization around social issues on reservations. Many groups like this one used graphic design to address urgent concerns particular to their communities, typically communicating in their own languages and tapping into visual traditions specific to their tribes.

I Vote, 2020

Kevin Coochwytewa (b. 1976, Isleta Pueblo/Hopi)

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• Native Americans were not acknowledged as United States citizens until 1924, and even then, many states continued to block them from voting through discriminatory legislation. The last state, Utah, did not remove such restrictions until 1957. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned tactics like literacy tests and poll taxes, and its 1975 amendments, which mandated language accessibility, were essential in making the ballot practically accessible to Native voters. Yet participation remained low since other obstacles persisted: remote polling locations, active suppression, and a shared understanding in Native communities that they were not truly welcome. 
• The text in this poster frames participation not as assimilation but as strategy—a tool for defending tribal sovereignty within existing systems and exercising cultural responsibility. The direct address of the phrase “I Vote” speaks to multiple scales of governance: clan, tribe, county, nation, and federal. The designer is asserting that each level needs Native voices to remind the government that Indigenous people are still present in the country.
• The composition incorporates geometric shapes stacked like ceremonial patterns that simultaneously spell out “VOTE” in ribboned columns suggesting Latin letterforms and interweaving Native aesthetics with a call to participate in democratic processes.

ᎧᎹᎹ Kamama, 2022

Monique Ortman (b. 1987, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma)

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• In 1821, the Cherokee intellectual and historian Sequoyah created the Cherokee syllabary. It consists of 86 symbols, each representing a syllable in the Cherokee language. Officially adopted by the Cherokee Nation in 1825, it led to a literacy rate of approximately 90 percent among the Cherokee within a decade—far exceeding that of white settlers in the surrounding area.
• Monique Ortman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, whose artistic practice encompasses paper-weaving, mat-weaving, and type design, designed this syllabary poster for both traditional craft and digital platforms. In it, historic letterforms have been updated to reflect a more contemporary, punk aesthetic and can be woven into textiles or coded into websites. The syllabary brings Cherokee visual culture into the modern era, indicating that the Cherokee language belongs equally in ancestral crafts and emerging technologies.
• ᎧᎹᎹ (kamama) means both “butterfly” and “elephant” in Cherokee, reflecting the visual resonance between butterfly wings and elephant ears. The title of the poster also suggests transformation and memory—the butterfly’s metamorphosis combined with the elephant’s vast memory. With few Indigenous-made typefaces available, Ortman’s work fills a gap and promotes cultural pride and ownership over language; it’s a powerful example of a Cherokee person designing Cherokee letters for Cherokee use.

Gaswéñdah / Two Row Wampum Belt (replica), 2024–25

Tony Gonyea (b. 1961, Onondaga Nation)

Polymode Foundation Collect, Courtesy of the Artist

• Wampum belts are the most similar objects to posters found in many Indigenous cultures, sharing a public, graphic language that transcends spoken words. Native peoples across different tribes, speaking different languages, invented these beaded documents to explain highly nuanced stories, agreements, and ratified treaties. Replicas were often made to help spread information to wider audiences. They could be worn, displayed, and shown as legal devices, making complex diplomatic concepts visible and portable. Like posters, wampum belts convey meaning through design, color, pattern, and symbols, broadcasting messages across linguistic barriers. Wampum belts also communicate sovereignty as clearly as any constitution, declaration, or manifesto—serving as visual treaties that remain legible, and in use, for centuries.
• In this ceramic replica of a mid-16th century Haudenosaunee design, two purple rows run parallel through white beads to represent Indigenous people in a canoe and Dutch settlers in a boat, traveling the same river without interfering with each other. The original belts recorded this foundational agreement between Natives and settlers to uphold values of lasting peace and friendship grounded in mutual respect for cultural and political sovereignty.
• Tony Gonyea, a Faithkeeper for the Onondaga Nation, Beaver Clan, began replicating wampum belts in 2010 after studying traditional techniques. Actual wampum requires intricate crafting from quahog shells (a type of clam), particularly the deep-purple hinge, and are sacred objects intended only for documenting official agreements between tribes. Meticulous recreations like this one educate the public about Indigenous cultures without undermining the ceremonial function of the original pieces.

Navajo Dye Chart, c. 1980

Ella Myers (Dates Unknown, Diné [Navajo Nation])

Collection of the Ford Foundation 

• This shadow box displays more than 40 plants and the colors they produce on wool thread through the dyeing process. The artist Ella Myers created multiple variations of this teaching tool over the course of many decades, ultimately printing it as a poster to allow for broader distribution.
• The information shared in this object and the related posters serves as a record of the ancient Indigenous knowledge of and relationship to the natural world.
• Each dyed strand in this diagram links a dried botanical specimen to a miniature Diné loom weaving, showing precisely the hue produced by that plant. 
• Through this work, Myers continues a tradition her mother-in-law, Mabel Burnside Myers, formalized in the 1950s as a teaching tool for younger Native generations. What began as an inherited family practice became a widely circulated record of Diné dyeing techniques.
• The information in this object embodies Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), a federally recognized Indigenous wisdom system based on collective understanding and experiences with the natural world. Each specimen represents an intimate relationship with a place, specifically when to harvest, how to prepare, and how to gather sustainably.

All Indian Nations Arts Festival, 1980

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (b. 1954, Diné [Navajo Nation])

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Native art fairs, festivals, markets, and powwows are gathering places of cultural celebration, creative expression, and economic opportunity. They are also spaces where Indigenous people sometimes invite those from other backgrounds to experience their culture, as was the case with this particular event. 
• In this poster, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie juxtaposes Indigenous dancers in regalia against the San Francisco cityscape at sunset, contrasting the traditional and ancient with the technological and modern. As a practicing photographer and video artist, she has always championed what is known as visual (or creative) sovereignty—the right of Indigenous peoples to self-representation. Here, she emphasizes this notion by centering her Native figures in monochrome against the vivid, hypersaturated colors of the background, highlighting a Native presence in urban space.

Count Yourself In!, 1986

Rocky Fiddler (b. 1959, Cree [Sandy Lake First Nation])

Poster House Permanent Collection

• In this bilingual, double-sided poster, designed for all three recognized Indigenous peoples in Canada (First Nations, Inuit, and Métis), Rocky Fiddler uses organic forms, traditional dress, and the transformation of sound into image to assert that Indigenous modes of expression and knowledge remain vital tools for navigating contemporary requirements like the census. 

• The composition is not representative of any single Canadian tribal community but incorporates visual signifiers shared or understood by many, depicted in the Woodland style of painting. Each of the motifs, including a running elk, a warm and radiant sun, a teepee, and communal figures, can have multiple meanings. This commonality emphasizes that federal data collection can happen on Indigenous terms—keeping ceremony, tradition, and cultural pride intact.
• Rocky Fiddler, a Cree artist from Sandy Lake First Nation in northwestern Ontario, learned from elders who shared histories and sacred legends with him. He then transformed these oral traditions into his distinctive visual narrative style. This poster continues that practice, making stories visible across linguistic barriers. Fiddler’s handwriting in Cree at the upper left also reminds viewers to support the preservation and use of Indigenous languages.

Discover America With The First Americans, 1969

Joe Powskey (1948–2022, Hualapai [Walapai]/Hopi)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Produced at a time when National Parks still promoted “Indian” performances and gift shops sold “authentic” headdresses to tourists, this poster adapts the advertising tropes used to sell Manifest Destiny—the 19th-century belief that the United States was destined by God to “conquer” the breadth of the North American continent—to Indigenous purposes. Rather than framing a white politician, here the traditional scrollwork and the patriotic red, white, and blue lettering enclose a proud, eastward-facing Native who has reversed the westward gaze of expansion as he looks back at the origins of colonialism.
• The visual language here also satirizes travel posters produced under the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—President Roosevelt’s New Deal employment program; the artists in its Federal Art Project (1935–1943) made bold graphic designs inviting tourists to “See America First.” These advertisements depicted Indigenous peoples alongside geysers and canyons as local attractions, marketing Native cultures as roadside curiosities; they did not even begin to acknowledge the realities of dispossession and contemporary Native life.

You Are On _____ Land, 2017

Warren Montoya (b. 1982, Tamaya/Kha’po Owingeh) and Jaclyn Roessel (b. 1983, Diné [Navajo Nation])

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• Designed by Warren Montoya and Jaclyn Roessel in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, this poster was intended to be freely distributed around the country, most especially to schools, community centers, and places of public gathering. The composition is naturally participatory, asking viewers to write in the name of the tribe whose ancestral land they currently occupy. The simple act of filling in the blank requires research, consideration, and acknowledgement of the original caretakers of a given area.
• The composition also incorporates a carefully considered choice of typefaces and letterforms. The sans-serif font in the upper register imbues the text with official, bureaucratic overtones, while the hand-drawn, more organic lettering of the word “Land” in the lower register challenges formal administration. Additionally, the background maps the actual shape of Turtle Island (North America), ignoring colonial borders that slice through Indigenous territories and typically demarcate Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
• While land acknowledgments have become common at public events, this poster pushes the idea further, making the statement both physical and personal. It asks all viewers to become participants in giving recognition, naming what was taken, and asserting that Indigenous presence is not past tense but present reality.

Kituwah (Gi-dóo-wah), 1991

Creative Direction: Pamela Conseen Adams (1953–2015, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians)

Design: Price/McNabb

Collection of the Museum of the Cherokee People, 2023.0033

• This poster for a Native gathering in Asheville, North Carolina, is a good example of Indigenous advertising entirely created by Indigenous people. Pamela Conseen Adams both directed the creative process and appears in the photograph alongside Shennelle Feather (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians/Diné/Lakota). 
• The title references Kituwah, the Cherokee “mother town” and spiritual center of the Cherokee world. Many Indigenous nations have similar sacred origin places that are central to their creation stories. Every object in the photograph is also personal to the poster’s creators, including the honeysuckle baskets woven by Adams or her mother, Nancy Conseen; a Diné rug by Feather’s grandmother, Connie Atine; yellow beadwork and Keds decorated by Feather’s mother, Cindy Atine; a Pendleton blanket used by Feather’s great-grandmother, Hedibah Begay.
• Although it features in an advertisement that would have been seen by people from all backgrounds, the photograph incorporates symbolism and messaging intended specifically for a Native audience. These women are surrounded not by museum artifacts but by living culture—objects that have moved between generations, ceremonies, and daily use and that are important to their personal histories while more broadly representing modern Native life. 
• Historically, Indigenous people have been informed by anthropologists outside of their communities about what qualifies as “authentically” Native. This poster combines traditional items like the Cherokee tear dresses worn by the two figures with modern fashion items like the beaded Keds that some would claim are not truly of the culture. Such assumptions hinder the ability of Indigenous artists to evolve and adapt, freezing them in the past. By showing these objects together, the poster’s creators effectively establish a Native presence that does not require outside validation.

Alcatraz Indianland, 1972

Joseph “Indian Joe” Morris (1921–2009, Blackfeet Nation)

Collection of Michael Lellouche

• One year after federal marshals removed the last occupiers from Alcatraz Island, “Indian Joe” Morris designed this poster detailing how the participants made the prison a tribal home. It documents where people ate, slept, stored generators, and kept livestock—transforming Alcatraz from an abandoned prison to a living community. 
• The proclamation displayed on the nearby animal hide also appears in this design alongside illustrations of sacred objects, including a ceremonial pipe, a battle shield, and a teepee set against the Golden Gate Bridge. The presence of the proclamation underscores its importance to the movement and its message was ultimately extended to an even wider audience through this printed poster. 
• The poster also traces the Native history of San Francisco Bay and the island, documenting why Indigenous peoples from across the country converged here to protest. It also references public solidarity with the participants: mentions of donations from the band Creedence Clearwater Revival and support from actress and activist Jane Fonda are interwoven with sacred motifs, showing how the fight for resources was inseparable from the hallowed act of return.

When the Buffalo Return They Will Come From the West, c. 1975

Earl Livermore (b. 1932, Blackfeet Nation)

Courtesy of the United States Marshals Service and the United States Marshals Museum, Inc.

• Created in honor of the Alcatraz occupation to raise funds for the ongoing cause, this poster invokes the Ghost Dance prophecy. Originating with the Paiute people and spreading across many nations during the late 19th century, it foretold that the return of the buffalo from the west would bring spiritual and cultural renewal to Native peoples.
• The lettering on the poster is especially powerful. Each “a” in Alcatraz is also a teepee with support poles extending beyond the peak. This small graphic choice transforms the name of a former government property into a shelter for Indigenous people—one of the symbolic gestures of the actual occupation and protests. 
• Earl Livermore was the last director of San Francisco’s American Indian Center before it burned down in 1969. He became a key organizer of the Alcatraz occupation, and viewed this event as the fulfillment of sacred Indigenous predictions that Native Americans would return from urban exile to reclaim their ancestral land. 
• Many tribes, including Livermore’s Blackfeet Nation, are leading efforts to restore buffalo across ancestral territories, bringing them back from near extinction.

Proclamation for the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, 1970

Designer(s) Once Known

Courtesy of the United States Marshals Service and the United States Marshals Museum, Inc.

• Displayed in the dining area during the occupation of Alcatraz, this stretched animal hide replicates the Proclamation for the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz. It was written collectively by Adam Fortunate Eagle (Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians) and the Indians of All Tribes, and functions both as a manifesto and as a billboard, announcing the beliefs and goals of those involved.
• While part of a serious act of protest, this proclamation also satirizes oppression; it includes an offer to purchase Alcatraz for $24 worth of beads and cloth (referencing the “sale” of Manahatta—now known as Manhattan—to the Dutch) and notes similarities between the island and the reservations (no running water, no healthcare, no employment). The artists also use traditional Indigenous materials to convey a contemporary message, stressing that Native traditions are not merely confined to the past.
• This document further proposes transforming the prison into centers for Native education, spirituality, and ecology. None of these suggestions were realized; Alcatraz became a historic museum in 1973, two years after the occupation ended.

Alcatraz, 2009

Jesus Barraza (b. 1976, Xicanx)

From the Collection of the Artist

Alcatraz, 2009

Jesus Barraza (b. 1976, Xicanx)

From the Collection of the Artist

• Produced more than 40 years after the original events, these two posters honor the legacy of the American Indian Movement and, specifically, the occupation of Alcatraz Island—a historic moment that the designer refers to as “Indigenous Peoples’ Thanksgiving.” 
• The poster on the top incorporates an illustrated version of Ilka Hartmann’s photograph from June 11, 1971—the day federal marshals removed the last occupiers from Alcatraz. It shows Harold Patty (Paiute), Oohosis (Cree), Peggy Lee Ellenwood (Sioux [Fort Peck Tribes]), and Sandy Berger (Shoshone-Bannock) raising their fists in continued protest despite their forced removal. Additional documentary photographs by Hartmann are layered behind them.
• Rather than focusing on the past, the companion poster highlights a Native person in profile facing the rising sun with calm determination. When considered together, Jesus Barraza’s two designs give a sense of how the 19-month-long occupation transformed Indigenous resistance.
• The occupation of Alcatraz sparked what is known as the Self-Determination Era for Indigenous peoples, a time marked by an unprecedented surge in Native activism. Collectively, these protests and other acts of civil disobedience resulted in the introduction of new laws that protected tribal rights.

American Indian Movement, 1973

Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall (1918–93, Mohawk [Kahnawà:ke])

Collection of Michael Lellouche

• Founded in Minneapolis in 1968 by Native men who had met in prison, the American Indian Movement (AIM) emerged from enforced displacement. Its organizers shared experiences inflicted on them by U.S. government policy, including mandatory boarding schools that stripped them of their culture, military service despite being denied the right to vote, and urban poverty.
• In response to this isolation, urban Native Americans began organizing pan-tribally, becoming what scholars called “transnationals”—citizens of nations within nations—transforming alienation into collective power that enabled them to address police brutality, poverty, and discrimination.
• This poster was created in December 1973, just a few months after AIM’s 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, when approximately 200 Oglala Lakota seized the South Dakota town in protest against unfair treaty negotiations with the government. The imagery reflects classic Western poster design but incorporates Indigenous symbols: a Native woman holds the Statue of Liberty’s torch and a wampum belt, a crouched figure with a feathered headband grips an automatic weapon, and the American and Canadian flags are inverted—an international distress signal.

Defend Ganienkeh, 1974

Designer Once Known 

Collection of Michael Lellouche

• In May 1974, traditionalist Mohawks occupied a 612-acre site at Moss Lake, New York, establishing Ganienkeh (Land of the Flint) as territory reclaimed from New York State. After three years of negotiations, the community relocated to land near Altona, New York. Unlike most Indigenous land struggles that ended in violent removal, Ganienkeh remains Mohawk territory today.
• This poster was created during the early days of the armed occupation, a fight that would last until 1977 despite hundreds of attempted negotiation sessions between the Mohawk Nation and the U.S. government. The design champions the demand for territorial reclamation “under the great law,” and features human figures in red (a color with sacred significance in many Indigenous traditions, including ceremonial body painting, although it is also used pejoratively to describe Native Americans) alongside pine trees (sacred plants for the Haudenosaunee peoples, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, as noted at the center of the composition).
• The rhythmic, geometric design also references the historic Gaswéñdah/Two Row Wampum Belt, a 1613 treaty between the Haudenosaunee and Dutch settlers in which they agreed to peaceful coexistence; the tribe would also continue to govern itself and manage its own relationship to the land without interference from outside forces.

Alcatraz Proved a Point, c. 1972

Joseph “Indian Joe” Morris (1921–2009, Blackfeet Nation)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• The Ramaytush Ohlone people’s ancestral territory includes Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. After Spanish colonization in the 1770s forcibly relocated them to Mission Dolores in San Francisco, successive colonial governments continued their displacement to more than 100 reservations across California.
• In March 1963, the notorious Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was closed and its land was turned over to the City of San Francisco. Indigenous activists noted that the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie between the U. S. government and various groups within the Lakota, Yanktonai Dakota, and Arapaho Nation tribes indicated that such a closure would actually allow Indigenous peoples to reclaim ownership of this land. 
• Determined to see the terms of this treaty honored, 89 activists descended upon Alcatraz Island. While only a handful were able to get ashore, this initial gesture snowballed into what would become a 19-month-long occupation that, at its height, involved approximately 400 Indigenous participants. A major event within the American Indian Movement, this occupation was led by activists calling themselves the Indians of All Tribes, which included such notable individuals as Richard Oakes (Mohawk [Akwesasne]), LaNada Means (Shoshone-Bannock), and John Trudell (Santee Dakota). 
• While the occupation was ultimately unsuccessful (the government cut off all water and electricity to the island, forcing people to leave, and the Coast Guard physically removed anyone who stayed behind), it remains one of the most significant moments within the American Indian Movement, bringing Native rights issues to an international audience on an unprecedented scale and inspiring countless other protests.
• This poster, created after the Alcatraz occupation ended, honors those who participated, incorporating the spiritual imagery of a sacred pipe, buffalo spirits, and eagle feathers alongside the names of 30 tribes, thereby emphasizing national Indigenous unity. 
• The artist Joseph Morris was also involved in the occupation. A Blackfeet longshoreman and member of the local longshoremen’s union, he helped coordinate the Pier 40 depot during the occupation, arranging shipments to the island and handling finances.

Indian Power, c. 1971

Designer Once Known 

Collection of Michael Lellouche

• In 1964, Peabody Energy reached a questionable agreement with Diné and, two years later, Hopi tribal leaders that granted permission for the company to mine the area for important natural resources, including coal, minerals, and a nearby aquifer. Only later would it become clear that the attorney representing one of the tribes was actually being paid by Peabody Energy, undermining the tribes’ sovereignty—its authority to negotiate and govern on its own terms—and acting against Indigenous interests.
• As a result of these tainted agreements, Peabody Energy began work on two coal strip mines on the Black Mesa Chapter of the Navajo Nation in Arizona. It used the water from the nearby Navajo aquifer to wash the coal, and built a 273-mile pipeline to transfer it to a power station in Nevada. These activities transformed the surrounding area, known as Four Corners, from a pristine natural environment to a ravaged landscape. Additionally, between 12,000 and 16,000 Diné were forcibly relocated—the most significant Indigenous displacement since the Trail of Tears in the mid-19th century.
• Printed in the color of Indigenous resistance, this poster repurposes a photograph taken on April 17, 1971, during one of many protests against strip mining on Black Mesa. The defiant central figure is Leroy Keams (Diné [Navajo Nation]), a prominent member of the American Indian Movement.

Black Mesa/Turning Point or Vanishing Point, 1972

Ashby (Dates Unknown)

Collection of Michael Lellouche

• Founded in 1970 by Jack Loeffler, Edward Abbey, and others, the Black Mesa Defense Fund was an activist organization created to support Hopi and Diné resistance against Peabody Coal Company’s strip-mining operations on their ancestral lands in northern Arizona. It emerged alongside groups like Greenpeace as part of a new wave of environmental activism that favored direct action and media-savvy protest over the lobbying strategies of older conservation organizations like the Sierra Club.
• Printed by the Black Mesa Defense Fund to mobilize support, this poster incorporates sacred Diné geography. The foreground features three sandstone buttes rising from Monument Valley (known in Navajo as Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii or Valley of the Rocks). According to Navajo tradition, these geological monuments are the carcasses of long-defeated monsters—an important juxtaposition considering that this poster was designed to protest the new monster—Peabody Energy—threatening their land. 
• The motif of four hands is known as Healer’s Hands in the Navajo tradition. The convergence point of the hands marks the sun’s center and their spiraling palms invoke the Great Spirit’s protection, blessing, and healing power over endangered lands.
• While the protests did not lead to the desired outcome, Peabody Energy ceased mining Black Mesa in 2005. The nearby Kayenta Mine stopped operating in 2019. Irreparable damage, however, had already been done to the land and the peoples, and there are ongoing proposals to reopen both sites.

Shrine of Hypocrisy, 1975

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• In addition to publishing newspapers, pamphlets, and books, Akwesasne Notes also issued posters that readers could buy through mail order. These works all promoted Indigenous pride, either through the celebration of specific histories or by amplifying and promoting notions of sovereignty and self-determination. 
• The site of Mount Rushmore (named in this poster as the Shrine of Hypocrisy), carved into the Lakota’s sacred Black Hills in 1941, had originally been promised to the Lakota in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie; however, this treaty was negated after the discovery of gold in the area.
• In this poster, created for the United States Bicentennial in 1976, the designer juxtaposes the American vision of its most important forefathers with that of Native peoples, reminding the viewer in a final quote from Nez Perce Chief Old Joseph that they had never sold the land to these “founders” of the country in the first place. The portrait is of Lakota Chief Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull), leader alongside Crazy Horse at the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn), at which they destroyed General Custer’s 7th Cavalry in defense of the very hills featured in this image. 
• The designer of this poster employed a strategy called temporal enmeshment—the collapsing of past and present to assert ongoing Indigenous presence. By installing Sitting Bull above Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington—each of whom implemented destructive policies against Native peoples—the artist transforms a monument to democracy into evidence of some of its most egregious failures.

Let Us Put Our Minds Together, c. 1975

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• In this poster, David F. Barry’s 1885 ethnographic portrait of Lakota Chief Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake (Sitting Bull) becomes a mouthpiece for Indigenous expression, highlighting a famous quote by the chief in the color of Indigenous resistance. 
• Issued at the height of Indigenous activism in the 1970s, it demonstrates how many Natives looked to the past for inspiration and guidance. Here, that wisdom focuses on the building of a collective future rather than individual glory.

We Must All See Ourselves As Part Of This Earth, c. 1975

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• The photograph in this poster was taken in 1908 by Edward Curtis, an American photographer who spent three decades documenting Native Americans for his monumental project The North American Indian, published in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930. Though unprecedented in scale, Curtis’s work was shaped by some of the notions about Native people that were held by certain white Americans of his era; they tended to romanticize Native life and believed that they must record images of a “vanishing race” through what anthropologists called “ethnographic salvage.” Such images aimed to freeze Indigenous people in an imagined, idealized past, ignoring evidence of contemporary Native existence or the sense of a future for Native communities. Such ideas are represented here in the figure of the woman standing alone with her gathered rushes, posed as a timeless “noble savage” rather than as a person navigating the harsh realities of an early 20th-century reservation.
• When paired with the words of Lakota medicine man Tȟáȟča Hušté (John Fire Lame Deer), the central figure in this Akwesasne Notes poster is transformed from an ethnographic specimen to a land defender. The word “we” suggests solidarity across tribes and time, asserting that Native women are not isolated figures in nature but active custodians of threatened territories.
• This reclamation demonstrates what is known as visual sovereignty: the deploying of images meant to document extinction to insist on continued presence and collective resistance.

We Decided…, c. 1975

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)
Woodcut illustration: Bruce Carter (1931–2016)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Intended to look like a woodblock print, this poster centers a dignified, calm, yet bound Native man in a traditional buffalo-bone breastplate (most commonly associated with the Comanche but broadly used throughout the Plains). Below the image, a quote from American Indian Movement leader Carter Camp (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma) asserts that the threat of imprisonment was not powerful enough to deter Indigenous activists from fighting for their rights and those of future Native generations. 
• In 1972, Camp organized the Trail of Broken Treaties takeover of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. He and 500 others occupied and set fire to some of the offices, demanding that the government address issues like treaty rights, the termination of federal policies harmful to Native Americans, and the establishment of better living conditions. He then led the first wave of the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation on Pine Ridge Reservation, where this quote originates.
• At Wounded Knee, Camp and fellow organizers Dennis Banks and Russell Means seized the trading post, expelled Bureau of Indian Affairs staff, took 11 hostages, and held the site for 71 days to force recognition of Lakota sovereignty and expose government corruption. For his participation, Camp served three years in federal prison.

We Did Not Think of the Great Open Plains, c. 1970

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This poster is also based on a photograph by Edward Curtis, taken in 1909. Its subject is Kúnúh-kanánu (Bear Belly), an Arikara warrior who “gained his medicine” (meaning healing abilities or sacred knowledge) by single-handedly killing three bears in 1847. His bearskin represents the spiritual power he earned through that courage and ceremony. 
• Today, the Arikara are one of the Three Affiliated Tribes (also known as the MHA Nation), along with the Mandan and Hidatsa. Their historic homeland extends from North Dakota to Wyoming, covering much of the Missouri River Basin. 
• While it is not attributed on the poster, the accompanying quote is from Luther Standing Bear, a Lakota author and philosopher who fought for Native sovereignty through policy reform between the 1890s and the 1920s. Known as the Progressive Era, this period, when the U.S. government actively attempted to erase Native culture through forced assimilation, was traumatic for Indigenous people. Leaders like Standing Bear railed against these efforts, providing space and structure for advocacy that ultimately led to the government’s recognition of sovereignty for many tribes.
• Standing Bear’s words emphasize that only settlers view nature as wild rather than sacred. He also references the Great Mystery, one of many concepts shared by numerous Indigenous cultures that evoke the sacred presence and power instilled in all things.

Why Should an Indian Woman…, c. 1970

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This unapologetically confrontational poster features a photograph of Betty Hunter of the Nakoda Nation smoking a pipe. Harry Pollard photographed her in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, sometime in the early 20th century as part of his personal record of Indigenous peoples residing in the western portion of the country.
• By pairing this already self-assured portrait with a quote confronting Eurocentric beauty standards, the poster underscores that, especially for women, the world values whiteness as the price of acceptance. For Native women, hair also carries deep cultural and spiritual significance—braids connect to ancestors, to ceremony, and to a broader sense of identity. To bleach, cut, or hide traditional hairstyles represents more insidious forms of erasure and echoes a history rife with such acts, from boarding schools where Native children’s braids were cut to contemporary workplaces that deem Indigenous appearance “unprofessional.”
• In the years since this poster was published, singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose quote accompanies Hunter’s portrait, was revealed to have lied about her Native Canadian ancestry. Since then, she has been stripped of many of her awards and honors; yet her deceit remains a painful example of the predatory appropriation of Indigenous identity for personal gain.

I Must Continue to Lead My People, c. 1980

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• In 1946, the year after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, Dan Katchongva, Son of Yukiuma (keeper of the Fire Clan tablets) and leader of the Sun Clan of the Hopi, joined three other Hopi elders in carrying traditional prophecies to the wider world. This timing was not a coincidence: the Hopi understood that humanity had reached a crossroads, and required the benefit of ancient wisdom in order to avert an apocalypse.
• This Akwesasne Notes poster combines a press portrait of Katchongva with one of his teachings. While his message of peaceful resistance through spiritual strength had first appeared in his 1970 book Message to All People (also published by Akwesasne Notes), the alternative “peaceful way of life” that he advocates here remained relevant in an era reeling from the Vietnam War and other global conflicts. His insistence on the “purification of all living things” further speaks to both the environmental and spiritual crises of the time.

Our Ideas Will Overcome Your Ideas, c. 1980

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This poster was designed around the time that neoliberalism was gaining cultural momentum throughout the United States. This school of thought posits that capitalism and the overall economy will thrive only through free-market policies involving minimal government intervention and regulation. Such systems stand in opposition to most Indigenous ways of life, prioritizing extraction and consumption over shared resources and respect for the natural world. 
• Cyrus Dallin’s 1890 bronze sculpture, A Signal of Peace, located in Lincoln Park in Chicago, stands at the center of the image. The Native rider raises what Dallin called “a peace offering.” Designed by the artist after he had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Paris, the sculpture embodies a colonial view of “the noble savage.” In spite of the fact that contemporary observers have condemned it for perpetuating harmful stereotypes, the statue still stands in Chicago today.
• The photograph in this poster is not a composite image but a document of creative vandalism undertaken by Michael Mulloch in 1971. Rather than presenting a peace offering, the Native warrior skewers a shopping cart, holding it aloft as representative of both the American worship of consumerism and of Indigenous rejection of the capitalist systems that engender it. This gesture is underscored by the accompanying quote from Vine Deloria, Jr., a Standing Rock Lakota intellectual and the author of Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) and God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973).

Cover My Earth Mother, c. 1975

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne)

Poster House Permanent Collection 

• The photograph in this poster was taken by Edward Curtis in 1900; known as “Zuni Governor,” it was one of his earliest and most widely circulated portraits. It captures Sa We Ta Fina, a leader at Zuni Pueblo in western New Mexico, who was selected for his strong features and, as Curtis noted, his “unusually focused and intent gaze.” The dramatic lighting and elegant composition here exemplify Curtis’s romantic primitivism, freezing the Zuni leader in a state of ethnographic timelessness.
• The designer for Akwesasne Notes combined the portrait with a Zuni rain invocation, reconfiguring this anthropological document as a prayer vessel. The gold text emanates from the fabric of the sitter’s richly textured garment, turning his portrait into a site of ongoing ceremony.
• This poster was created around 1975 during severe droughts that affected many Indigenous lands and suggests resistance through spiritual practice as a companion to much of the more direct protest promoted in other posters within the series.

Family Portrait, c. 1975

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne) 

Poster House Permanent Collection 

• As the text in the lower margin indicates, this photograph was taken in the 1920s somewhere in Saskatchewan, Canada, on Treaty Day, when communities across western Canada gather to commemorate the Numbered Treaties between First Nations and the government of Canada. Such gatherings are complex occasions, celebrating nation-to-nation agreements but also reminding attendees of what has been lost, promised, and broken.
• The 16 subjects gaze unwaveringly at the camera while wearing their finest regalia, asserting cultural pride during an official diplomatic gathering. By combining this image with the quote at the top, Akwesasne Notes collapses time: those photographed in the 1920s become models for the 1970s activists who must consider how their resistance will be judged by those as yet unborn. The poster insists that every generation carries a dual responsibility: the honoring of ancestors while becoming ancestors worth honoring.

Signs of the Times, c. 1980

Akwesasne Notes (Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne) 

Poster House Permanent Collection

• As noted in the lower margin of this poster, the photograph in it was taken by German photographer Henning Christoph. It shows a sign posted outside Old Oraibi, one of North America’s oldest continuously inhabited settlements, located on the Third Mesa of the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. The sign was erected by the village council of Old Oraibi after tourists repeatedly ignored prohibitions against the photographing of sacred Hopi dances.

• After they were forcibly moved and confined to reservations, Native peoples continually faced invasion by tourists who disregarded both tribal and federal laws protecting religious practices. Many sacred ceremonies were simply treated as entertainment. This sign asserts self-governance over both Hopi land and Hopi culture, demanding that outsiders not treat those autonomous spaces as their own. 
• Akwesasne Notes’s distribution of this image was intended to remind viewers that power includes the ability to say no—a seemingly small act of resistance and self-respect that can have a dramatic impact. The poster is printed in red ink on yellow paper, making it both a symbol of Native resistance and a warning.

Iláyya’Sha Katihma, 2024

Jimmy Dean Horn (b. 1988, Chickasaw Nation)

Courtesy of the Artist

We Are Still Here, 2024

Jimmy Dean Horn (b. 1988, Chickasaw Nation)

Courtesy of the Artist

• The poster on the left depicts a hand-carved map of the continental United States set against a diamond pattern of a kind frequently incorporated in Indigenous weaving, pottery, and parfleche (a buffalo-hide container or large satchel). The map chronicles the history of colonial expansion from the precontact paradise of the Atlantic coast to the bloody encounters with settlers that left countless Native bodies in their wake. This visual narrative includes enslaved people bound by ball and chain, barbed wire, and bullets; pens used to sign dishonest treaties are turned into weapons. An Indigenous family lies dead at the center, their bodies skewered by a Christian cross as the American flag crowns this pastiche of colonial violence.
• The declaration “We Are Still Here” is lettered beneath this horrific scene in Chickasaw, the artist’s ancestral language. The hand-cut typeface used in both posters is based on that found on the packaging of Marlboro cigarettes, a brand known for its cowboy figures and fantasy depictions of the American West. This interpretation of the font subverts colonial imagery as an act of Indigenous resistance.
• The companion poster on the right features the English translation of the Chickasaw title alongside a standing portrait of Hopayi’ Minko’ (Piomingo, c. 1750–99), a Chickasaw chief and diplomat. Dressed in traditional garb, he holds the staff featured in Chickasaw/Choctaw origin stories. In them, two brothers flee from the west to the east, the staff marking their leadership and initiative.

Sick & Tired of Living on Stolen Land?, 2023

New Red Order [Jackson Polys (b. 1976, Tlingit), Adam Khalil (b. 1988, Ojibwe, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), and Zack Khalil (b. 1991, Ojibwe, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians)] with Riley Hooker (b. 1982) and Dylan Clancy (b. 1987)

Gift of New Red Order, Poster House Permanent Collection

Create Indigenous Futures Today!, 2023

New Red Order [Jackson Polys (b. 1976, Tlingit), Adam Khalil (b. 1988, Ojibwe, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), and Zack Khalil (b. 1991, Ojibwe, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians)] with Riley Hooker (b. 1982) and Dylan Clancy (b. 1987)

Gift of New Red Order, Poster House Permanent Collection

• The language of contemporary marketing campaigns is used in these two posters to promote decolonization and Indigenization (the process of making something more Indigenous). They were printed as part of The World’s UnFair by New Red Order (NRO), a biting, satirical take on historic World’s Fairs and what the creators argue were their racist, colonial practices. This free public art installation was on view in Queens, New York, from September through October 2023. 
• The first poster incorporates two modern advertising images ubiquitous in New York City: the iconic I 🧡NY logo by American graphic designer Milton Glaser and the recently popularized Brooklinen-brand tote bag sported by celebrities and chic Brooklyn residents. Both have come to symbolize not just a move to the city but also its gentrification. Here, however, the motifs have been reinterpreted: Glaser’s heart has been replaced by a petroglyph of a human figure in a canoe and the bedding company’s name by that of the Lenape people’s name for their traditional homeland (of which New York City is a part). For those interested in giving back this stolen land (and using that moving box to go elsewhere), a hotline listed at the bottom is ready to assist.
• The poster on the right features two cartoonishly distorted figures that fuse Dutch clogs with cigar-store Indians—merging symbols of colonial settlement with the racist caricatures long used to market “Indian” products. Their anthropomorphic mouths are agape; one smokes a cigar and salutes the viewer in mocking reference to such advertising tropes. Spray-painted over them in red—a color long associated with Indigenous resistance—is a version of NRO’s logo, a hybrid design combining the symbol of a corporate bank with Indigenous elements. This approach aligns with Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig’s theory of additive defacement: it does not erase the offensive imagery but marks it as condemned—acknowledged yet decisively rejected.
• The concept of Indigenous futures focuses on using ancient Native wisdom and teachings to help establish a new means of community for Indigenous people. In a society where Native Americans have been historically abused, this idea positions them not as passive actors bound to the whims of others but as active shapers of their own destinies on their own terms.

Landback, c. 2022

Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. (b. 1948)

Gift of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., Poster House Permanent Collection

• The Land Back movement is an ongoing effort to reestablish Native American sovereignty by restoring the political authority of Indigenous people over their ancestral territories. The goal is not to displace current residents but to transfer power over those areas back to those who originally occupied them. The movement has already achieved many small victories, including the return of some land to tribal management and joint-stewardship programs; Native groups have also raised funds to buy back ancestral territories.
• Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. is a Black letterpress printer and an Indigenous ally currently living in Detroit, Michigan. He has designed many variants of this poster, most of which involve overlaying a vintage illustrated map with large wood-type letters declaring “Landback.” Here, he has selected a map of Manhattan, originally known by the Lenape as Manahatta or “hilly island.” 
• In 1626, the Dutch “purchased” this Manahatta from the Lenape, beginning centuries of forced displacement, mass death, and environmental destruction. Due to its role as a center of global power and commerce, New York City is also the least likely place to ever be returned to its original stewards—and yet that is exactly what Kennedy is demanding in this poster.

Treaty Rights on Iskonikan, 2023 

Kent Monkman (b. 1965, Fish River Cree Nation)

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• Iskonikan is the Cree word for “leftover land,” a phrase used to describe the reserves onto which the Canadian government forced Indigenous people, areas that they could not legally leave until all the way into the 1950s. In the lead-up to this displacement, numerous treaties were signed, many of which stated that Native people would retain the right to hunt, fish, and gather on the land they were ceding. None of these agreements were honored.
• This poster by Kent Monkman features his Two-Spirit alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle—a figure present throughout his extensive body of work and one that embodies multiple forms of cultural resistance. Representing both masculine and feminine spirits, Miss Chief most often appears in order to actively reclaim gender identities that predate colonization and that were often targeted for erasure by Christian authorities. Their nonbinary presence is further emphasized by Miss Chief’s stiletto heels and G-string as well as by the pink background of the poster, the color of queer resistance dating back to the time of Nazi persecution.

No DAPL/Mnî Wičhóni, 2017 

Sadie Red Wing (b. 1990, Lakota/Dakota [Spirit Lake Tribe])

Poster House Permanent Collection 

• Beginning in April 2016, thousands gathered at Standing Rock Reservation on the border of North and South Dakota to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline from crossing beneath the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Intended to transport crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, this pipeline threatened Native water supplies and sacred sites. 
• Sadie Red Wing, an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Tribe (Mniwakaƞ Oyate), created this poster for both on-the-ground protests and virtual resistance. Its square format allowed it to be easily shared on social media while remaining scalable for at-home printing.
• Red Wing’s design employs traditional Lakota/Dakota visual language in a modern context, including stars, the sun, the earth, mountains, flowing water, and blooming flowers. Together, these motifs declare “Mní Wičhóni” (Water is Life)—a reminder that within Indigenous law, water is more than just a resource—it is a sacred relative.
• At Standing Rock, Red Wing led workshops in collaboration with numerous Indigenous artists, making protest art on paper and fabric for those present to use right away. These efforts were acts of creative sovereignty, promoting Native-made artistry, imagery, and messaging for an Indigenous-led movement.

Water is Life, c. 2016

Onaman Collective [Christi Belcourt (b. 1966, Métis) and Isaac Murdoch (b. 1975, Ojibwe, Serpent River First Nation)] 

Polymode Foundation Collect, Courtesy of the Artist

Water is Sacred, c. 2016

Onaman Collective [Christi Belcourt (b. 1966, Métis) and Isaac Murdoch (b. 1975, Ojibwe, Serpent River First Nation)] 

Polymode Foundation Collect, Courtesy of the Artist

• Created for the 2016 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, these two posters emphasize the sacred role of water in Indigenous life, embodied here by female forms. More than 10,000 Indigenous people led protests in defense of Native water and land at the site of the Dakota Access Pipeline over the course of 10 months, making it the largest recorded Native gathering of the past century.
• The thunderbird, a mythical spirit shared by many Indigenous groups, is considered a protector of humanity from evil. In Water is Sacred, the thunderbird has taken on the body of a woman, her heart expanding as she calls forth the rain. Meanwhile, Water is Life is a translation of the Lakota phrase “Mní Wičhóni,” which here serves as both prayer and battle cry as a woman stands between earth and sky with water cycling through her pregnant body; she simultaneously nourishes her baby and the earth. 
• The Onaman Collective democratized its designs by publishing more than 40 images and colorways on its website, available as free PDFs that could be downloaded and printed as desired. The accompanying text was offered in Native languages as well as in English and Spanish. The collective also shares instructional videos on how to assemble banners from the designs. As a result, these posters have been used in locations as distinctive as Standing Rock, the Amazon, and the Arctic but all championing the protection of Indigenous water.

Ka-Kistêyimâyahkik, c. 2015

Melanie Cervantes (b. 1977, Xicanx)

Private Collection, Turtle Island

Indigenous Women, 2015

Melanie Cervantes (b. 1977, Xicanx)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• These two posters show variations on a single motif. In both, an armed Indigenous woman faces east toward the dawn while holding a plant, acting simultaneously as a giver of life and as a defender. These two roles are often separated by European gender norms; however, in many Indigenous cultures, they are shared equally between women and men. 
• While Cervantes is of Xicanx heritage (Native Mexican), she chose to produce this poster in English and Cree (one of the largest Native groups originating from present-day Canada). This gesture reflects a unity shared by all Native people, one also emphasized by the different plants held by the two women—both serve as food to nourish their people but each is local to a specific region.

We The Resilient, 2017

Ernesto Yerena Montejano (b. 1987, Yaqui)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This poster features an image of Helen “Granny” Redfeather (Oglala Lakota [Pine Ridge Indian Reservation]), an icon of Indigenous endurance. While she has participated in numerous acts of resistance throughout her life, including the Wounded Knee occupation, some of the most well-known images of Redfeather (including the photograph on which this poster is based) were made during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, where she was hit with water cannons and rubber bullets. 
• After the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, the Amplifier Foundation released its We the People campaign. Along with others in the series, this poster was displayed throughout Washington, D.C., during the Women’s March of January 21, 2017, asserting the long history of Indigenous endurance in the face of oppression.
• The inclusion of Native resistance as part of the Women’s March was especially significant as Indigenous women are often overlooked within feminist movements. 
• The poster also exemplifies the Indigenous concept of temporal collapse, bridging the ancient past (more than 500 years of attempted erasure are acknowledged in the tagline “have been there before”) with the infinite present (the reproduction of Redfeather’s image and its addition to archival collections like these mean she will live on forever as an emblem of resistance).

Giving Thanks, 2017

Dignidad Rebelde [Melanie Cervantes (b. 1977, Xicanx) and Jesus Barraza (b. 1976, Xicanx)]

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• In an attempt to counter the Thanksgiving narrative that sanitizes invasion and extreme violence against Native Americans, Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza transform the message of the holiday here as they encourage gratitude for the thousands of Indigenous people who resisted submission, displacement, and erasure. 
• The design honors three women who played notable roles in the history of Native protest: Berta Cáceres (Lenca), who died defending Honduran rivers in 2016; Bobbi Jean Three Legs (Hunkpapa Oyate [Standing Rock Sioux Tribe]), who endured water cannons at Standing Rock; and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez (Mexica), a youth leader of the Earth Guardians, a group that is currently suing the U.S. government over climate change. 
• The roses that surround them are symbols that appear repeatedly in grassroots protest posters, particularly those featuring women, and represent both beauty and strength. The blue-washed photograph behind them shows a figure holding the Mohawk Warrior Flag (Rotisken’rakéhte), an emblem designed by Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk) in 1974 that is prominent at Indigenous protests worldwide.

Leonard Crowdog, 1977

Paul Davis (b. 1938)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This poster honors Leonard Crow Dog (1942–2021), the Lakota medicine man whose spiritual leadership recast the focus of the American Indian Movement (AIM) from urban activism into sacred resistance. When AIM founder Dennis Banks sought a spiritual leader in 1970, he found Crow Dog already organizing on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, practicing traditional medicine and leading Sun Dance ceremonies to keep Lakota traditions alive.
• During the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation, Crow Dog provided spiritual guidance to protesters who held the site for 71 days. His vision—that sovereignty meant cultural survival, not just political autonomy—shaped the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act, granting tribes (among other rights), the ability to decide how their health and education programs would be run within their communities.
• In 1975, in response to his role at Wounded Knee, the U.S. government sent more than 100 law-enforcement personnel to Crow Dog’s home under the pretense of looking for Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), an Indigenous activist who was suspected of killing two FBI agents. Taken into custody as a presumed accomplice, Crow Dog was subsequently imprisoned at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas and put in solitary confinement for two weeks. After almost two years of incarceration, international pressure, letters, and petitions secured his release. The National Council of Churches (the largest pan-Christian group in the United States) raised $150,000 for his defense, with attorney Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Lakota), arguing that prosecuting a medicine man violated religious freedom.

Free Leonard Peltier, c. 1976

Designer Once Known

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Leonard Peltier (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa) was an American Indian Movement (AIM) activist convicted of killing two FBI agents during a 1975 shootout at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. His case became a global symbol of injustice: witnesses recanted testimonies given under duress to the FBI, evidence was shown to have been withheld, and at least one witness received immunity in exchange for testimony against Peltier. This notorious trial made Peltier’s cause a rallying cry for the movement, his image invoked in countless protest posters, songs, and ceremonies. 
• Peltier’s case is one of many examples of Indigenous resistance to a conviction many viewed as political retaliation for AIM’s activism. From prison cells to the United Nations, supporters maintained that Peltier’s imprisonment exemplified the criminalization of Indigenous resistance.
• On January 19, 2025, President Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence to indefinite house arrest. On February 18, after nearly half a century behind bars, Peltier was released to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

Respect Our Vision, 1976

Menominee Solidarity Committee 

Poster House Permanent Collection

• The photograph in this poster was taken during the 34-day siege by the Menominee Warrior Society of the Alexian Brothers’ Novitiate, an abandoned Catholic monastery in Gresham, Wisconsin. Inspired by similar acts of resistance at Wounded Knee and Alcatraz, the Menominee forcibly took over the space on New Year’s Day in 1975, demanding that the 64-room building be turned into a hospital or school for their people.
• The occupation followed a failed effort at forced assimilation by the U.S. government. In 1961, Congress had terminated the Menominees’ sovereign status, believing that their successful timber industry made them “ready for mainstream culture” and able to sustain themselves. The results were catastrophic: poverty soared, the government sold part of the land, public services like utilities and schools collapsed, and the only local hospital was forced to close.
• Led by organizers including Ada Deer (Menominee), later assistant secretary of Indian Affairs, the Menominee fought back with activism and legal challenges. As a result of their persistence, President Richard Nixon signed legislation on December 22, 1973, that restored federal recognition to the tribe. The monastery occupation further forced the Catholic Church to transfer that property to the Menominee Nation for “$1 and other considerations.” By 1976, when this poster was published, the tribe had ratified a new constitution.

Stand with Crowdog, 1976

Designer Once Known 

Poster House Permanent Collection

• While the previous poster was made by a supporter of Leonard Crow Dog’s cause, many others were produced by Indigenous designers to raise awareness and secure his release. Here, four days of sacred rituals starting with sunrise at Lake Menona in Wisconsin are promoted in great detail in ceremonial colors. 
• In this composition, a geometric Native design is surrounded by words referencing kinship—including son, brother, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great spirit, great mystery, sky, grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, and great-grandmother earth. This visual prayer positions Crow Dog at the center of a cosmic family extending from earth to sky and asserting that his imprisonment violates not just human law but also sacred relationships.
• This poster merges political solidarity and spiritual practice, indicating that, especially for Indigenous activists, the two are inherently linked. Rather than demanding signatures or donations, it invites supporters to participate in collective prayer, aligning themselves with traditional ceremonial times: sunrise, noon, and sunset.

Protect the Sacred, 2024 

SIYO-WIN [Lauren S. Peters] (b. 1997, Dakota Sioux/Mexican)

Private Collection, Turtle Island

• Indigenous women and girls are murdered at a rate that is 10 times that of the national average, and homicide is the third leading cause of death. More than 80 percent of them also experience stalking as well as physical or sexual violence. Despite these alarming statistics, their cases routinely vanish from official databases, unrecorded and uninvestigated. This problem is so vast and so common that these victims are collectively known as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).
• Born out of grassroots concern and outrage, the MMIW movement uses a red handprint across the mouth as its international symbol, representing the silencing of these women and girls as well as the society that fails to speak up for them. This poster is one of many that incorporates this motif, and was wheatpasted throughout Los Angeles in 2024. 
• Since its founding, the movement has expanded and is now described as MMIWG2S+ to include girls, Two-Spirit, and other gender-diverse people, recognizing the full spectrum of violence against Indigenous gender identities. Two-Spirit is a modern pan-Indigenous term introduced by Native people in the early 1990s. It does not have a single definition but is often used to describe Indigenous people whose identities encompass diverse understandings of gender, sexuality, and social roles rooted in their specific cultural contexts. Their position in Indigenous society was historically held sacred and respected; however, since colonization, such identities have been pushed to the margins.

Reward Increased, 2019

Created by friends and family of Kaysera Stops Pretty Places

Courtesy of Grace Bulltail and family

• On August 24, 2019, 18-year-old Kaysera Stops Pretty Places (Crow/Northern Cheyenne) disappeared in Hardin, Montana. Five days later, she was found dead in a nearby backyard. Authorities ruled that her cause of death was “undetermined” and closed the case despite her family’s pleas for a thorough investigation. This poster was created by the friends and family of Kaysera Stops Pretty Places in an attempt to find justice.
• While it reflects the conventions of traditional reward posters for other crimes, this design also incorporates the bloody red hand used by MMIW to draw attention to such uninvestigated crimes against Native women. Current statistics indicate that one in three Native women will be sexually assaulted, with 67 percent of reported assaults involving non-Indigenous perpetrators. It is estimated, however, that more than 70 percent of all sexual assaults against Indigenous women go unreported. 
• According to the estimates of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kaysera Stops Pretty Places’s murder is one of approximately 4,200 cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous persons that have been reported and remain unsolved.

Phillip Deere, 1987

Photographer: Dick Bancroft (1927–2018)

Designer: Wicasta (Dates Unknown)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Phillip Deere, a traditional Mvskoke (Muscogee Creek) healer from Nuyaka Grounds, Oklahoma, became a spiritual guide for the American Indian Movement (AIM) and an elder statesman for the International Indian Treaty Council, an organization founded in 1974 and focusing on the human rights of Indigenous people around the world. 
• At the United Nations International Human Rights Commission in Geneva in 1977, Deere declared that Native Americans are America’s original people who survived colonization through their traditional laws of love, peace, and respect—unlike the confused modern society that requires prisons and asylums. He described how Indigenous peoples welcomed and taught Europeans how to survive, only to face centuries of land theft and broken treaties that now force them to seek human rights abroad. He warned that Indigenous oppression was a preview of coming universal oppression, and that all Americans would soon lose their freedoms.
• While he operated on a global scale, Deere encouraged Mvskoke youth to retain their culture while pursuing education, insisting that songs and ceremonies could only survive through the Mvskoke language.
• This poster features a quote from Deere that expresses his desire for future generations to embrace and promote Indigenous culture. It is surrounded by the four colors of the medicine wheel (yellow, red, black, and white), representing the cardinal directions and the cycles of life itself. The medicine wheel—interpreted differently across tribes—maps the sacred relationship between all beings, the seasons of life, and the four aspects of existence: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. The blue and green handprints are meant to invoke a covenant between Deere’s words and Native children, pulling the past into the future through the collapse of time as a wheel.

Protect Your Culture/Learn About AIDS, 1988

Duke Wassaja Sine (b. 1955, Yavapai/San Carlos Apache)

Courtesy of IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, NM

• Indigenous communities have long been disproportionately impacted by public health crises. From the earliest days of European settlement, smallpox, against which Native Americans had no natural immunity, resulted in thousands of deaths. There were even instances of European settlers weaponizing the disease by giving Native Americans blankets infected with the smallpox virus. Contamination of Native water sources by Europeans also resulted in mass cholera outbreaks throughout the 19th century. When modern healthcare was offered to Indigenous communities, it was often accompanied by underfunded and unequal access or reflected ulterior motives (as in the nonconsensual sterilization of Native women in the 1960s and ’70s).
• During the AIDS crisis, Indigenous communities were rarely provided with the necessary information to educate their populations around prevention and were not given access to essential life-extending care. Racial misclassification in medical records further obscured the epidemic’s true impact, contributing to chronic underfunding. Disparities persist today: in 2021, American Indian and Alaska Native people had the lowest awareness of their HIV status of any racial or ethnic group, and in many urban areas fewer than one in four had ever been tested. Unable to rely on outside sources for help, the communities themselves created posters like this one to provide lifelines to the greater community. 
• This design shows a diverse gathering of Native peoples around a map of Arizona. Their dress blends contemporary clothing with traditional elements, emphasizing the need for ancient wisdom to face this modern disease. Unlike other posters from the period, this image presents the virus as a community problem rather than one experienced just by individuals and their friends and family—a reminder of strength and love through collective cohesion. It is uplifting rather than bleak, projecting the power of kinship.

42nd Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial, 1963

Louie Ewing (1908–83)

Poster House Permanent Collection

44th Annual Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial, 1965

Louie Ewing (1908–83)

Poster House Permanent Collection

Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, 1967

Louie Ewing (1908–83)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Louie Ewing’s silkscreen posters for the annual Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, New Mexico, embody the contradictions of appreciation without equity. Ewing was a pioneer of serigraphy (silkscreen printing) in the Southwest who had trained with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era federal program that funded the arts and employed millions of Americans to build infrastructure. He was commissioned by the government to create these posters—yet the designs are not entirely his own. 
• Ewing notes in the margin of each poster the names of the Native artists whose work he has adapted in the composition: Frank Vigil (Jicarilla Apache), Jim Redcorn (Osage), and Raymond Chavez (Zuni Pueblo). These artists did not directly collaborate with Ewing on these images nor were they compensated for the use of their motifs. 
• Founded in 1922 by Gallup’s coal-mining citizens, this annual event promised to present “the Indian in his true nature” while promoting tourism to their isolated frontier town. The organizers urged the public to “appreciate” and “perpetuate” Native cultures that they themselves were not a part of, reinforcing the idea of the white savior as the best and only means of preserving a heritage.

Buy War Bonds/More Tomahawks, 1942 

Ben Quintana/Há-ă-tee (1920–44, Cochiti Pueblo), Eva Mirabel/Eah-Ha-Wa (1920–68, Taos Pueblo), and Charles Presbetonequa (1915–87, Sauk and Fox)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This sheet of paper features three separate posters designed by young Native artists at the United States Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Works like this one, commissioned by the Department of the Treasury, were shipped around the country by the U. S. government to be cut up and displayed individually in public buildings, including schools and post offices. 
• The instructional text along the top indicates that the young artists see America as their ancestral homeland and therefore have a special interest in defending it. The poster in the lower register even shows young Natives about to purchase War Stamps, a means of financially supporting the government during World War II at a lower cost than the cheapest War Bonds. Such patriotic gestures are inevitably complicated by the historic treatment of Native youth, who were forced into boarding schools that stripped them of their culture and compelled them to live on impoverished reservations.
• The posters also highlight the fact that the U.S. military frequently adopted Native words for their weapons of war, from Apache helicopters to Tomahawk missiles. These instruments of death stand in sharp contrast to the types of weapons historically used by Native Americans and assist in a level of mass killing that most Indigenous cultures would find abhorrent. 
• These contradictions of intent and result are further complicated by the fact that Native Americans and Alaska Natives serve in the U.S. military at rates disproportionately higher than their percentage of the population—they comprise about 1.7 percent of active-duty personnel today, compared to just over 1 percent of the total U.S. population. Many serve with deep pride, defending a nation built on their dispossession.

Tucson, c. 1970

Designer Once Known

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Goyathlay (Geronimo) was a Chiricahua Apache leader whose decades-long resistance to Mexican and United States forces made him the country’s most famous “hostile Indian.” His legend carries with it a mythology of rebellion and strength that often overshadows the seriousness of his fight for the preservation of his people. 
• In this poster, an 1887 photograph by Benjamin Wittick of Goyathlay is co-opted to promote tourism to the town of Tucson, Arizona. The Native leader is framed within the orange circle of a setting sun (or, alternatively, a red bull’s-eye). The accompanying text parodies the marketing slogan “George Washington slept here” that is frequently used by colonial inns and historic homes to enhance their cultural significance. 
• Goyathlay’s time in Tucson was not voluntary. In 1886, he was imprisoned and displayed as a tourist attraction there, eventually dying in captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The photograph used in this poster was taken during his time as a prisoner of war.

Dancing Boy/Blackfeet Indian, 1946

Winold Reiss (1886–1953)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Printed in an almost square format, this reproduction of a painting by Reiss would have been incorporated in both calendars and advertising posters by the Great Northern Railway. Here, Reiss portrays a young Blackfeet dancer in traditional regalia holding a ceremonial rattle. 
• However, the many meanings conveyed by the rattle in the boy’s hand are absent from this dignified portrait. During ceremonies, it maintains rhythm, signifying membership in society and connecting the physical and spiritual worlds through sound. Different rattles serve specific purposes—some represent animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms while others mark participation in particular societies, much like the Chicken Dance (a dance most associated with the Blackfeet that reinforces the interconnectedness between man and nature, and one unrelated to the modern American dance of the same name). Through trance-inducing rhythms, rattles create pathways between worlds, serving as instruments of both independence and sacred connection.
• At the time that this poster was in circulation, a generation of Blackfeet children had been forced through boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian, save the man,” in a phrase attributed to Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Dancing, regalia, and rattles were legally forbidden; nonetheless, exceptions were made if they were being used to entertain tourists.

Empire Builder/Western Star, 1952

Winold Reiss (1886–1953)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• In this portrait of a “Blackfeet Indian Brave,” Reiss presents a man he identifies as “Middle Rider” seated in front of Nínaiistáko (Chief Mountain), a sacred site central to Blackfeet belief systems, located on the border of Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. More than 9,000 feet tall, Nínaiistáko is visible from as far away as Alberta, Canada, and has been a spiritual center for ceremonies and vision quests for centuries.
• Published material by the Great Northern Railway refers to Middle Rider as “a fine representative of the younger conservative full-blood Indians on the Blackfeet reservation who still prefer the simple, healthful outdoor life to the more complex ways of modern living.” While intended as advertising language to promote the “exotic” encounters that might be had by travelers on its trains, this sentence is loaded with demeaning language. The term “full-blood” reduces Indigenous identity to racial purity, drawing on pseudoscientific racial theories like eugenics that had been developed in the 19th century. The reference to the “simple, healthful outdoor life” denies the intellectual and spiritual sophistication of the activities of Native people, and “still prefer” suggests that one day they might make a different choice. Together, these notions frame rich cultural experience and continuity as quaint stubbornness.

Route of the Empire Builder, 1937

Winold Reiss (1886–1953)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• German immigrant, artist, and designer Winold Reiss made more than 250 portraits of Native Americans, particularly the Blackfeet of Montana. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Reiss paid his models well, employed translators to hear their stories while he worked, and maintained lifelong relationships with Blackfeet families. He also waived tuition for Blackfeet students at his summer art school near Glacier National Park (1931, 1934–37), establishing rare integrated classrooms for Indigenous and non-Native students.
• Many of these sensitively rendered portraits were purchased by the Great Northern Railway for reproduction on its promotional calendars, postcards, posters, and other printed materials between the 1920s and the 1960s. The travel destination featured on these items was most often Glacier National Park, a traditional Blackfeet territory from which they had been largely displaced.
• This poster, with its Art Deco typography and modernist layout, incorporates sacred Indigenous imagery to sell scenic tourism. The main figure performs part of a Sun Dance ceremony practiced by many Plains Natives and in which entire communities participate in collective prayer, sacrifice, and vision-seeking over multiple days. Participants undertake profound physical ordeals, including voluntary piercing and fasting, as sacred commitments to their people’s well-being. Here, though, the figure has been diminished; he is no longer a participant in a hallowed ritual but serves merely as a single exoticized entertainer. 
• Between 1883 and 1978, in an effort to promote assimilation and suppress Native culture, the U.S. government banned the Sun Dance under the Code of Indian Offenses, fining and even imprisoning those who practiced their own religion. During these same decades, this image circulated freely in railway advertisements—a ceremony that was used to sell train tickets could not legally be practiced by those for whom it had genuine meaning.

Route of the Empire Builder, 1940

Winold Reiss (1886–1953)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This poster is based on Reiss’s painting The Sign Talkers and depicts two Blackfeet men in contrasting regalia communicating through sign language. The railway’s accompanying text reduces this complex method of intertribal diplomacy to mere tourist entertainment.
• Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL) is not pantomime but a sophisticated form of communication. This fully developed language system enabled trade, diplomacy, and cultural exchange across dozens of nations, each speaking a distinct language. For centuries before European contact, Native peoples maintained continental networks through this shared visual language, negotiating treaties, conducting commerce, and building alliances.
• While Reiss suggests the individual dignity of the two figures, his sale of the rights to reproduce the painting ultimately commodified them and promoted a colonial narrative. By the time this poster was published, federal boarding schools had spent decades punishing Native children for using their own languages—spoken or signed. That same government also subsidized railways like the Great Northern that marketed “sign talkers” as little more than quaint tourist attractions.

Historical Pageant, 1912

Moses Lawrence Blumenthal (1879–1955)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• In the early 20th century, American cities, particularly those in the Northeast, began staging historic pageants to promote cultural unity and a shared vision of the country’s past, both locally and nationally. Such events leaned heavily into the myth that America had been founded by a civilized agreement between European settlers and Native Americans that they would coexist peaceably.
• This poster reinforces that inaccurate history, showing William Penn (a Quaker who helped found the city of Philadelphia) standing authoritatively over an Indigenous figure and a faceless, blond colonizer. While both are kneeling, the Native American appears more submissive, stooped forward beneath Penn’s outstretched hand, while the other figure is only on one knee and appears more physically robust. These small artistic choices subtly establish the balance of power.
• While Penn is often seen as a leader who prioritized peace and promoted fair negotiations with Native Americans, his agreements, particularly with the Lenape, led to the mass displacement of those people in favor of European settlers. Here, he is presented as someone the people of Philadelphia can be proud of, reinforcing the myth that no one was harmed in the establishment of the city. 
• By including a submissive Native man in this poster, the designer recasts political negotiations that were fraught with injustice as benevolent conquest. The composition, overflowing with quaint nostalgia, contributes to the historic normalization of the subjugation of Indigenous people, submitting it not just as inevitable but also as desirable.

Northern Pacific/Rodeo Parade, c. 1935

Edward Vincent Brewer (1873–1971)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Starting in the early 1880s, “dude ranches” began populating the American West, providing tourists nostalgic for a more rural, simple life with a chance to experience the “Wild West” (but with all the comforts of modern civilization). These ranches only existed due to the extrication of Indigenous people from the land that they occupied. 
• This poster shows a “rodeo parade” in Montana, presented as one of the attractions visible along the routes served by the Northern Pacific Railway. The image features an elaborately dressed Native figure leading the procession in his role as an authentic symbol of frontier life. Unlike the other figures, he does not smile; he may be the focus of the design but he is the least powerful person in it. 
• Performances like these were very popular, and evoked the pageantry of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows without providing any additional support for Native populations.

Indio Rosa, c. 1930

Designer Once Known

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Many Native nations hold tobacco as sacred medicine, using it in ceremony and prayer for millennia before European contact. Here, that revered act is turned into casual commercialization, presented as a distinctly unsacred pastime for mass consumption and endorsed by an “authentic” smoker. 
• Published in Spain, this poster demonstrates that the use of Indigenous figures in marketing was not limited to the English-speaking world. The product itself, a brand of cigarette rolling papers, is named “Indio Rosa” (Pink Indian), presumably a reference to the “red” slur used to describe Native skin.
• In addition to using Indigenous figures to add an “exotic” or “authentic” quality to advertised tobacco products, such imagery helped recruit more Native smokers, driving addiction rates in Indigenous communities to twice that of the national average.

The Chief Way, c. 1949

Designer Once Known

Poster House Permanent Collection

• The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (ATSF) was one of the largest rail companies in the United States for much of the 20th century. To expand its routes into the American West, it accepted congressional land grants created by the dispossession and displacement of Native peoples, including the Kaw, Osage, and Potawatomi nations.
• In addition to the forced removal of Indigenous people from the land where the railway laid its tracks, this industrial interference also disrupted the habitats of bison and other animals essential to Native survival. Cut off from water sources and grazing land, herds experienced species collapse, and tribes could no longer hunt game to feed themselves. 
• To promote its routes through former Indigenous territory, the ATSF produced numerous posters featuring Native figures. It also named its premier trains “Chiefs”—Super Chief, San Francisco Chief, Texas Chief, and Kansas City Chief—transforming a title imbued with historic reverence and importance into a branding tool.
• Here, a romanticized depiction of a Native elder in a feather bonnet provides potential tourists with the fantasy that they, too, might encounter a real-life Indian chief if they traveled on the ATSF. Such commercial promises effectively exploited Indigenous peoples’ land for profit while simultaneously assisting in their removal from those same places. The full-feathered headdress evokes Plains nations such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, conflating several traditions in a generic chief. The striped textile references trade blankets that became widespread after European contact while the geometric beadwork is too loosely described to be attributed to any specific tradition.

Pollution: It’s a Crying Shame, c. 1971

Designer Once Known

Poster House Permanent Collection

• This poster is based on a still image taken from a 1971 television advertising campaign for Keep America Beautiful, a lobbying organization founded in 1953 that actively fights environmental regulatory legislation. Considered one of the most memorable television public service announcements of all time, it attempts to shift the narrative away from industrial pollution and onto individuals in the effort to combat environmental destruction. 
• The infamous “crying Indian” in the campaign was better known as Iron Eyes Cody, an Italian-American actor named Espera Oscar de Corti who commonly played Native Americans in film, perpetuating stereotypes about Native people as he appears to speak for them. 
• The appropriation of Native identity in this poster and the television advertisement is also an overt example of how American advertisers have used imagery of Indigenous peoples as shorthand for environmental respect and wisdom while profiting from a history of stripping Native Americans of their land and criminalizing many of their environmental and religious practices. 
• In 2023, Keep America Beautiful announced that it was transferring the rights to the commercial to the National Congress of American Indians; the congress has since retired it from circulation.

Santa Fe/Ten Little Navajos, c. 1952

William Frederick Elms (1900–56)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Dating to the mid-19th century, “Ten Little Indians” is a nursery rhyme in which young Native boys decrease in number by one over the course of ten verses, each meeting an untimely death. While it was intended to teach children to count and potentially serve as a warning for reckless behavior, it also devalues Indigenous life. 
• In this poster, the song has been adapted to include marketing language for the Santa Fe Railroad. Illustrations of ten Diné children in modern clothing accompany the text, with the implication that their typical outfits would be the opposite of “gay”—dirty, primitive, and sad. They have transformed themselves into bastions of the future to bear witness to the latest in train technology—one that cut through their ancestral homeland and compromised their ability to live in harmony with nature.

Blue Corn/The Bodyshop, 1992

Paul Davis (b. 1938)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• The Body Shop is a British cosmetics and skin care company that achieved global popularity in the late 1980s. It distinguished itself from other corporations in the category by emphasizing its ethical sourcing and environmental consciousness. This is one of many posters produced by the brand to highlight those efforts. 
• The central female figure inappropriately wears a sacred hairstyle of the Hopi known as “the squash blossom whorl.” It is traditionally worn by girls after they have ground corn at their paternal grandmother’s house during puberty ceremonies. The figure’s dress is also inauthentic; rather than plain white, Hopi weaving often features indigo and red borders as well as intricate diamond patterns that signify clan and ceremony. 
• Blue corn is also sacred to the Hopi. Cultivated for centuries through agricultural innovation by descendants of Ancient Pueblo peoples, it is central to religious ceremonies and survival in the high desert. 
• The poster fails to provide any information about the product it is promoting; it merely sells a romanticized view of Native culture to suggest the authenticity and purity of the brand.

Washington Redskins, c. 1965

David Boss (1932–99)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Sports teams have capitalized on Native American names for decades, often appropriating them to imply ferocity, strength, and the historic ownership of a given area. Similar to blackface minstrelsy, these gestures turn people into grotesque caricatures, reducing them and their traditions to stereotypes while those outside that culture get to “play Indian” and put on the emotional costume of another group. 
• Originally founded in 1932 as the Boston Braves, the team moved to Washington, D.C., the following year and changed its name to the Redskins. Both names invoke generic association with Native culture, although “redskins” had been a specific slur used to describe Native scalps and bodies that were collected for bounty payments from the 17th through the late 19th centuries.
• This poster was created during the Civil Rights era in the United States when various forms of racism, especially against Black Americans, were challenged. Despite the strides made during this time, insensitive and harmful Native imagery persisted, often without question from even the most activist portion of the population. The golden arrow and eagle feather on the team member’s helmet are both Indigenous sacred objects that have been reduced to a logo branding commodified violence. In 2020, after significant public pressure, the team changed its name to the Washington Commanders. Its logo was also updated to feature an uppercase “W” rather than symbols of Indigenous significance.

I’d Rather Be Red Than Dead, c. 1965

Designer Once Known 

Poster House Permanent Collection

• The phrase “I’d rather be dead than Red” emerged during the late 1950s as a catchphrase indicating that a person would sooner die than become a Communist. It gained national popularity during Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign and was later adopted by student protesters against the Vietnam War. 
• This poster inverts the original meaning of the slogan. The woman in the photograph, dressed like many hippies of the day living in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, proclaims that she would rather be a Communist than dead in Vietnam like so many American soldiers. 
• While it is intended to function like a typical dorm-room poster of the period, this composition is rife with cultural complications. Dressed like a stereotypical “Indian princess,” with black hair cascading over her shoulders, the woman is supposed to be read as Native American—a fact further underscored by the incorporation of the word “red” that has been pejoratively used to refer to Indigenous skin tones and functions as a racial slur.

Guinness, 1963

Dick (Wilk) Wilkinson (1911–?)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• “Tonto Talk” is a type of pidgin English assigned to Native American characters in the popular media, most especially within the Western genre, and is named for the Lone Ranger character Tonto. Leaning heavily into stereotypes, it is often used to indicate an uneducated or naive understanding of the world. In this poster, it is evident in the phrase “him strong” rather than “he is strong.” 
• Guinness is best known for its poster campaigns featuring animals expressing their love for the beer through various humorous antics. Here, that same lens is focused on Native American figures, encouraging the viewer to see them essentially as comic animals. Such dehumanization was commonplace in advertising even during the 1960s when the American Indian Movement was at its peak. 
• While the advertisement is meant to be lighthearted, it glosses over a bitter truth: Native Americans have and continue to suffer from alcohol abuse at disproportionate levels. This issue began during early contact, when settlers intoxicated Natives in order to exploit them during trade deals. During many acts of displacement, alcohol was again used to placate survivors, providing cheap, individual distraction from broad cultural loss.

National Savings Bank, 1969

Daphne Padden (1927–2009)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Exploitative depictions of Native Americans in advertising were not limited to those published in North America. European marketers quickly capitalized on the many fantasies that could be read into what was often a monolithic interpretation of hundreds of unique Indigenous cultures. Here, the United Kingdom’s National Savings Bank enlists a cartoon Native family to deliver a punchline about low interest rates. 
• This illustration falls into the category of minstrelsy, a type of racialized performance in media that is historically most associated with the negative, buffoonish caricaturization of Black people in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Native American minstrelsy came with its own host of grotesque tropes, including the color red as a substitute for Native skin tones (commonly referred to as redface); a pastiche of ceremonial dress that combined headdresses with buckskin tunics and long black braids; and the reduction of language to catchphrases meant to provoke laughter. In this instance, “how” is a bastardization of the Lakota/Dakota greeting better anglicized as “hau.” 
• This poster was created at the height of the Red Power movement when Natives across North America fought for their identity and sovereignty. Despite many landmark moments in this struggle, including the occupation of Alcatraz that happened in the year this poster was published, overtly racist advertising of this kind was still common across America and beyond.

Air India/Smoking is a Health Hazard, 1977

Designer Once Known

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Air India was the first non-European company to produce a mascot that resembled its own people. Created in the aftermath of the country’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, the Maharajah performed cheeky antics around the world to promote travel on India’s first luxury airline. While designed by native Indians, his depiction often leaned into harmful cultural stereotypes in the name of comedy. 
• The conceit of this poster positions two “Indians” on separate peaks; one is ethnically Indian, while the other is an Indigenous person of Turtle Island (North America) who had been given that name due to a lost explorer’s misunderstanding over where he was. The former attempts to send a message to the latter through a smoke signal, a form of communication between Native Americans invented by Hollywood, while the latter looks disappointed. The result can be read as a layered approach to racism, in which a formerly colonized country mocks another, implying both superiority and greater intelligence. 
• As health statistics about the negative impact of smoking became more widespread, anti-smoking campaigns began proliferating around the world. This poster’s inaccurate and insensitive representation of Indigenous culture reveals how even progressive health messaging used regressive stereotypes.

Air France/Amérique Du Nord, 1956

Jean Colin (1912–82)

Poster House Permanent Collection

• Designed for French audiences, this poster promotes a fantasy version of North America in which tourists can see skyscrapers and pipe-smoking Native Americans living side by side. 
• This visual narrative also implies that Indigenous people are relics of the past, incompatible with modern life. This figure has not evolved since colonial times, his traditions frozen while the surrounding area gave way to progress.