The Crying Indian - full commercial - Keep America Beautiful

Earth Day, the annual day of environmental action and awareness, was first held on April 22, 1970. This past April 22nd, we finally ventured into the woods behind our house and pulled 4 putrid truck tires/mosquito farms out of the mud, along with about 200 pounds of scrap metal, engine parts, and farm equipment. The place used to be a dairy farm, and I guess "out of sight" was "out of mind". If it were still the 70's, cleaning up the woods would have been "outta sight" in a whole different way.

Here's a clip of The Crying Indian from the early 70's. OK, so Chief Iron Eyes Cody wasn't a real Native American after all. That didn't stop the ad campaign from having a tremendous effect back then. And it's no less relevant today.

Here are some links to check out:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day
http://www.kab.org/

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Crying
• Indian
• Earth
• Day
• Keep
• America
• Beautiful
• Lorax
• Nashua
• River
• pollution
• environment
• reduce
• reuse
• recycle
• planet
• PSA
• gardening
• organic

[10TimesTheValue]

iNeedzAll, You'd be amazed how many Indians actually resent the term Native American. Most of the Natives were here loooooong before Amerigo Vespucci charted some of the coastlines to the South & North of the "discoveries" of Columbus.

[kalinga01]

this has a badass soundtrack

[ih8kit]

As a few people have pointed out, the "indian" we see in this Public Service Announcement (PSA) is an actor. He was actually an American of Italian descent. That aside, this PSA is very well done. The emotional impact of it is still felt to this day. That I believe is what we should get out of it. There is certainly nothing wrong with knowing the truth about the "indian", but let's not lose sight of the message conveyed.

[jigglypiggly]

@soylentteal ~ Middle-Class White Male complaining about PC.

[Brightleaf97]

How sad. I might show this to my Eco class, although it's hard to understand it. Sort of

[tucsonia]

Can someone tell me the name of the wonderful musical piece here?

[judit12a]

Retro commercial, Keep America Beautiful, awakened our hearts! Never to be forgotten!

[inde169]

earthearthearthearthearthearth­earthearth!

[bko99]

Hahaha, that silhouette was amazingly stereotypical.

[AssassinRecruit]

@INEEDZALL Just so you know, the place we call America today wasn't inhabited by humans until people came from Asia into the Americas by the polar ice caps.

[Fallout394]

Does no one care that #1.  That "Indian" is Italian, and In fact an actor that portrayed Indians in western movies. Or 2, that Keep America Beautiful is owned by an aluminum can manufacturer. This whole add is basically an attempt to guilt trip people into picking up this companies trash for them.