Dating to the mid-19th century, “Ten Little Indians” is a nursery rhyme in which young Native boys decrease in number by one over the course of ten verses, each meeting an untimely death. While it was intended to teach children to count and potentially serve as a warning for reckless behavior, it also devalues Indigenous life. In this poster, the song has been adapted to include marketing language for the Santa Fe Railroad. Illustrations of ten Diné (Navajo) children in modern clothing accompany the text, with the implication that their typical outfits would be the opposite of “gay”—dirty, primitive, and sad. They have transformed themselves into bastions of the future to bear witness to the latest in train technology—one that cut through their ancestral homeland and compromised their ability to live in harmony with nature.
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