Prussian painter John Gast’s 1872 composition “American Progress,” now held by the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, isn’t very good. An unsubtle celebration of Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century American mania for westward expansion at the expense of Indigenous peoples, Gast’s painting features a zaftig blonde-haired and blue-eyed avatar of Progress aloft in the sky, moving from a civilized east of ships, locomotives, and telegraph lines towards a wild west. White settlers in Conestoga wagons and stagecoaches follow her; a group of horse-bound Indigenous people flees into the finality of darkness towards the dusky horizon behind her. Beyond the horrific politics, the perspective is amateurish and the sense of color awkward, not to mention that the wonky proportions of the eponymous toga-clad incarnation of Progress herself are more a signifier of beauty than an actual example of it. Considering the painting’s relative lack of technical skill and its deserved disregard within the American artistic canon, there must be some reason beyond aesthetics that, on July 23, the social media directors at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) saw fit to post the painting on outlets such as Facebook along with the caption: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
The same year that Gast finished “American Progress,” a contingent of 130 soldiers of the 5th Calvary Regiment arrived at Skeleton Cave in Arizona’s Salt River Canyon, where a group of Yavapai people had been sheltering. In under an hour, the army slaughtered almost a hundred of the Yavapai, including many women and children. Within the ugly history of the so-called American Indian Wars — from the Puritans perpetrating what a contemporaneous historian called a “great and notable slaughter” of the Nipmuc Indigenous people in Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts in 1676 to local White settlers “consummat[ing] a most inhuman slaughter” against the Nasomah people in Randolph, Oregon in 1854 — the bloody events at Skeleton Cave can fade into the background. For while the stylized Indigenous people of Gast’s composition are rendered in red and black paint on canvas, the actual story of genocide on the frontier was colored in spilled blood and burnt flesh. As Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr. maintain in their essay in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (1992), “there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide … anywhere in the annals of human history.” Most references and considerations of Gast’s painting are illustrative of Stiffarm’s point — the majority of scholars would admit that “American Progress” is an ugly bit of colonial propaganda, making the DHS’s extolling of the painting even more ominous.