Cars, Cans, and Crying Indians: Automobility, Littering, and Indigeneity in 1970s US Environmental Literature

Abstract

A white American man hurls a bag of litter out of a speeding car. It explodes at the feet of Iron Eyes Cody, “America’s most famous Native American” (Andersen 403), standing next to a bustling interstate highway, and he sheds a single, iconic tear. This scene comes from the 1971 television campaign against littering produced by Keep America Beautiful (KAB), Inc., which became known simply as the “Crying Indian” Public Service Announcement (PSA). It provided the example par excellence of the stereotypical figure supposed to represent all Indigenous peoples in the United States: what anthropologist Shepard Krech labels the “Ecological Indian” (21). Represented in popular fiction, movies, and advertisements as being somehow closer to nature than white settlers, the Ecological Indian supposedly leaves no mark on the land they inhabit, embodying a pure relationship with the natural environment in contrast to the polluting one of white people. One of the better-known ironies of Iron Eyes Cody becoming America’s most famous Native American is that, despite being identified by Krech as Cherokee, he was actually an Italian–American actor named Espera Oscar DeCorti—a fact that tells one something about the integrity of Indigenous stereotypes in the media. Another established irony of the campaign is that KAB was actually a front group representing the interests of the same beer, can, and soda companies whose containers produced half of America’s litter, admonishing individuals who failed to dispose of their empties in the prescribed manner while privately lobbying against bills requiring the beverage industry to reuse and recycle its own waste (Strand). One aspect of the Crying Indian PSA that has received comparatively little critical attention is the positioning of the “Indigenous” character in relation to the white litterbug on the bustling highway, and the role of automobility in helping to create and perpetuate the idea of the Ecological Indian.