Rethinking Governmental Relationships

Early twentieth-century painters working in Taos and Santa Fe popularized romantic depictions of Native American scenes. While these images may have appeared to present ethnographic accuracy, often they created generic stereotypes by homogenizing the different Native American and Hispanic cultures of New Mexico. Irving Couse often depicted Pueblo men wearing Plains Indian apparel and war bonnets, an ethnographic fiction. These contrived paintings combined concepts of the Nobel Savage with colonial governmental attitudes toward Native peoples based on the idea of Manifest Destiny.

Late twentieth-century artists often have mocked these contrived images. T.C. Cannon lampooned the government's policy of presenting peace medals to Indian leaders who signed treaties and were subsequently removed from ancestral lands and sent to distant reservations. Tony Evanko creates modern misunderstandings by translating Indian treaties into an obscure language, Morse Code. And James Luna updates this process by plumbing the multiple meanings of a modern peace pipe .