“Honor the Treaties” Advertising Campaign

As a freshman in college, I saw Diane Sawyer’s 20/20 special titled “Hidden America: Children of the Plains". The piece follows the compelling stories of a few Native Americans who live on Pine Ridge Reservation. Now, let’s fast forward a couple years to when I discovered National Geographic photographer Aaron Huey’s work on Pine Ridge. Huey, who has visited Pine Ridge multiple times and who has documented and grown close to the people, sought to do something for the Native Americans there. He decided to create an advertising campaign that would bring attention to the Lakota people’s history and would inspire the people of Pine Ridge.

As Huey states, “When I first got to Pine Ridge I didn’t really get it. All of my first assignments were about poverty and violence and gangs. And all of those stories skimmed the surface. And now six years later, now that I know the real story, I realize that mainstream magazines won’t print it. The real story is the history. The history of broken treaties, of prisoner of war camps, and massacres. It’s too hard to look at. It’s too dark; it’s too layered and too painful to fit in between shampoo ads and car commercials. This project has reached the limits of print media…I want to take the images I’ve made over the last six years on Pine Ridge and put them on billboards, in subways; I want to put them on the sides of buses. I want to put them in places where people can’t ignore them” (TEDxTalks, 2011).

Here is an additional video on the campaign:

Huey is working with Shepard Fairey, who created the famous Obama "Hope" advertisement, and Ernesto Yerena, who is another well known street artist. These are some of the ads they have created for this campaign, but more can be found here. 

One of the great aspects of this campaign that I am particularly fond of is the fact that it is not a campaign centered on providing charity. It is an informational campaign that is meant to give the individuals of Pine Ridge a voice. I also support the way that Huey is distributing these images. The fact is, as Huey states in the video, he can create more awareness and establish a movement by putting the advertisements on billboards, in subway stations, and evoking communities to share and post the images where they can than in placing ads in magazines or in other similar locations. Lastly, I find that the images Huey is using for this campaign will really engage the target audience as they are both creative and innovative.

I hope by posting this, you too will now know about the campaign and perhaps even take action to post some of the posters from their site in your area.

TEDxTalks. (2011, May 27). TEDxDU: Aaron Huey Update. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh0J7hyZPmk