Welcome To Montana

This WPA Federal Art Project poster promoting Montana tourism exemplifies the "See America" campaign's romanticized appropriation of Native American imagery to market Western destinations. Multiple versions by artists including Jerome Henry Rothstein (depicting an Indian encampment by a lake), Richard Halls (showing tipis with mountains), and M. Weitzman (featuring mountain scenes with horse and rider) employed indigenous cultural symbols to evoke Montana's frontier heritage and exotic appeal for tourists seeking authentic American experiences. Created between 1936 and 1939 as silkscreen color prints on board for the U.S. Travel Bureau, these posters encouraged Depression-era Americans to explore their own country rather than travel abroad, simultaneously stimulating local economies and providing employment for WPA artists.

The posters' use of Native American iconography reflects complex and often problematic dynamics of cultural appropriation, wherein indigenous peoples' dispossession and forced assimilation enabled their culture's transformation into nostalgic tourist attraction. By the 1930s, Native Americans had been confined to reservations and their traditional ways of life largely destroyed, making it safe to romanticize them as symbols of a vanished wilderness rather than acknowledge them as peoples whose ongoing presence challenged narratives of inevitable progress. The WPA's promotion of Western tourism through indigenous imagery documents how the federal government commodified Native culture while implementing policies that suppressed actual Native peoples' autonomy and economic development. These posters exemplify New Deal era contradictions: genuine efforts to democratize leisure and employ artists coexisted with racial hierarchies that positioned Native Americans as aesthetic resources rather than political subjects, their cultural symbols available for appropriation by the same government that had orchestrated their marginalization.