Saturday, March 17, 2012

This piece really stood out to me out of all the ones that we've gone over recently, just because it has something really interesting to say and the way the artist went about saying it was really cool and attention grabbing. I've always felt that Native Americans got a terrible deal from the U.S. government, did you know that 93% of all treaties between the Native Americans and the government were broken? That really got on my nerves when i learned that. But this piece displays the feelings of a Native American who just suffered through that raw deal they were unfortunately handed. So many things in this piece really interest me for example the red ex  over the man is really cool, not only does it represent the uranium mines that the reservations were built on top of but it also kind of seems to represent the person dying or just that no people should live there. I hadn't noticed this before but there is a bumper sticker that says made in the USA above the man as well as a serial number which just kind of shows the lack of sympathy the US had for the people that originally inhabited this country. The news paper kind of ties it all together in my opinion, it reminds me that nobody in the news really covered the unfair treatment of the Native Americans even though it was such a big tragedy.

2 comments:

  1. I wanna say that this may be one of the earliest propaganda posters i may have seen. I agree with you; the fact that Americans pushed away the Natives, instead of embracing them and exchanging information. It could have caused a change in the future? Who knows. i like the feel behind this piece and the fact that it uses actual articles from the past gives it that touch of utter importance.

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  2. I think it is the ambiguity of this poster that makes it so controversial. This could be "anyman" - me or you - suffering unknowingly at the hand of a government that could choose to exploit us if we remain uninformed. Political propaganda was certainly used in art for centuries so this is not a new idea but usually it was used to exalt a ruler rather than point out an atrocity. Stay tuned in the weeks to come for more pieces that call us to action.

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