Discuss: The Crying Indian

If “America was the new Eden, complete with mournful, expelled Adam” does that make the displacer God?  Manifest Destiny….

All well and good, and excellent research, but I do want to add personal experience.  I was a kid roadtripping with my family in the late 50s, early 60s, and we really did pitch whole bags of trash out the windows.  It was typical, everybody did it. McDonalds was new, but just plain trash from the supermarket or deli, after a meal in the car, would go out the window. Nobody noticed the trash - the great highways and American landscape were still beautiful. It was simply cool to have a car and to traverse the land. But the trash really did pile up, and eventually people started to notice. This was even before seatbelts and headrests in cars. The crying Indian was HUGE in bringing a new word into the vocabulary—pollution.  Before that ad, most people wouldn’t have even known the word, or would have had to look it up in the extremely unlikely event of stumbling across it anywhere.  Pollution became a mainstream word after that, something we all understood, even though anyone’s actual actions were always open to judgement.

So, all that said, I am glad you are doing such great research and of course what you discovered is invaluable!  We should know about this smokescreen and press the industry to match their message.  But it doesn’t make the message less important.  Back then, we also still had segregation, or desegregation was still very fresh.  We are always evolving and we should always do better.  But unless you were there, throwing trash out car windows with normal, and nation-wide abandon, then learning a new word, and feeling the collective stop a huge amount of mindlessness, I don’t think you can really appreciate the how valuable that message was.  Not to whitewash its creators, but we have nowhere near the litter now that we might have had, had we not received that message.

The word ecology joined the mainstream not long after this.

That PSA was and is powerful. I understand there was manipulation involved, but the message still rings true: We need to clean up our mess, stat.
Thanks for the thoughtful article.

I’m not rating your article and saying it was good, but it too damn dramatic, almost made my tears fell down, we should support these quality articles like this that enlightens people and makes them aware of our surroundings.

This is a fantastic and thought-provoking article; thank you, Ginger!  When I mentioned Google’s new energy guzzling server on the Columbia River to a fellow coal activist, I was surprised to hear him marvel at Google’s wise business decision enabling it to stream data to and from billions of computers for mere pennies per kilowatt hour using “clean” energy.  Until we make connections between ways of living that contradict each other, the quiet revolution that our planet so desperately needs will always be just out of reach.  By oogling over bigger and better technologies and information transfer while ignoring how our personal consumptive habits—whether spending hours on Facebook, driving to work in a new Prius rather than biking, or giving to NGOs such as Keep America Beautiful—we fool ourselves into believing we do not need to do more—this, to me, seems a very dangerous situation, indeed…

I thought that The Crying Indian was a beautiful piece of art. I also thought that this article captured it very well. The entire ordeal was before my time so upon reading that it was on youtube I immediately thought that it was my duty to check it out and become an informed citizen. I must say I was rather shocked and baffled at the end of the article when the author stated that bit about bytes streaming to my computer from the banks of Columbia. I found the entire article all very insightful and interesting. I very much enjoyed how much it dealt with the American psyche and the American dream. It interested me to read the part about how many Americans were shocked at the revelation that the Native American in the commercial was not real. Watching it myself on youtube it never once crossed my mind that he may have been. To discover that so many Americans were shocked and repulsed by the news was intriguing to me. I have only praise for this article.

I thought this article was very well done. I, like the author above me, was born well after the seventies, but the ad was something I felt that I should see after hearing about the presence of the ad while learning about the ethics of consumerism. The ad was well worth watching, and this article on the ad was also well worth reading. The witty comments made the reading far from dry, and the point that the ad itself was a fraud was extremely interesting to read.

I particularly enjoyed reading about why in particular the ‘Crying Indian’ hit so hard on America. The idea that the Indian is the “noble savage”, as stated within the article, was well illustrated and undoubtedly true. I also enjoyed reading about the fact that the very agency that ‘tries to prevent and clean up pollution’ creates it through consumerism.

I greatly appreciated this article for opening my eyes to the truth of consumerism: there is little truth in consumerism. Thank you so much for this very informative, well written and quite enjoyable article.

Dear Ginger Strand,

Thanks for telling the truth as you see it and for speaking out loudly and clearly about what everyone knows but precious few will say.

As you know better than most of us, “denial” is not only a river in Egypt. However we choose to look at the taxonomy of denial, you help us easily see that many too many leaders are collusively engaged in its practice. Even though it is perverse, denial is consensually validated behavior. If enough elite people remain in denial, something more attractive…ie, something illusory…can be put in place of what is more real and somehow likely to be more truthful.

Doing good work along the path toward a good enough future for children will not be an easy task for anybody. Evidently, everybody wants to be a somebody, but nobody in a position of power willingly assumes the requisite responsibilities and performs the duties of office. Such so-called ‘leadership’ is both ubiquitous and woefully inadequate.

Occasionally a great person like you can be found who goes against the tide of people with power…who disputes the elitists who uniformly favor whatsoever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable and religiously tolerated.

Certainly I share the view that everyone-in-power’s silence with regard to what is happening in any “here and now” moment of space-time is the most formidable foe that the family of humanity faces.

Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176