Honor the Earth: Impacted Nations: a traveling art show: Read More

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indigenous peoples in the Great Plains including Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho developed a unique and powerful medium to document their history: ledger drawings. An extension of painting on buffalo-skin, Plains Indian artists began to use actual accounting ledgers to chronicle their way of life while acknowledging monumental social change.

Honor the Earth was commissioned by Honor the Earth for their 2003 concert tour. The drawing features a wind-powered generator symbolizing a clean way to produce energy in the present and future to meet the energy needs of all people so that the air and waters will remain clean and pure. The drawing also shows the Indigo Girls – Emily with her fire-red hair and the brunette, Amy – playing their guitars. There are also two men (Intertribal COUP President Pat Spears and Secretary Robert Gough) looking on and enjoying the music and the freshness of the air. At the bottom of the drawing there are four figures – two women (Lori Pourier and Winona LaDuke) dressed in jingle dress and a little girl (Lori’s daughter) and boy (Winona’s son), both in traditional Plains Indian dress.

Written by Honor the Earth