Published just days after the Wounded Knee Massacre, this 1891 Judge cover delivers one of the sharpest moral indictments of U.S. Indian policy ever put to print. A smug senator strolls past a skeletal camp labeled “Starved into rebellion, then shot,” exposing the government’s long pattern of starving Native communities, provoking resistance, and then justifying brutal retaliation. The cartoon flips the era’s racist slogan — “the only good Indian is the dead one” — to expose the cruelty behind it. This isn’t humor at Indigenous expense; it’s satire aimed squarely at the policymakers who engineered displacement, broken treaties, and mass death.
As authoritarian movements try again to sanitize history, images like this matter. They remind us that resistance art has always existed — and that confronting state violence is not new, but necessary.
Published just days after the Wounded Knee Massacre, this 1891 Judge cover delivers one of the sharpest moral indictments of U.S. Indian policy ever put to print. A smug senator strolls past a skeletal camp labeled “Starved into rebellion, then shot,” exposing the government’s long pattern of starving Native communities, provoking resistance, and then justifying brutal retaliation. The cartoon flips the era’s racist slogan — “the only good Indian is the dead one” — to expose the cruelty behind it. This isn’t humor at Indigenous expense; it’s satire aimed squarely at the policymakers who engineered displacement, broken treaties, and mass death.
As authoritarian movements try again to sanitize history, images like this matter. They remind us that resistance art has always existed — and that confronting state violence is not new, but necessary.
