Keep AZ Safe
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Thank you.
Janice K. Brewer, Governor
The Facebook group where I learned about this site is titled:
"Tell Jan Brewer to Remove MONUMENT VALLEY photo from keepazsafe.com"
The Facebook group notes that Monument Valley is located on the AZ/UT border: the opposite of where Brewer is trying to stem illegal immigration. The group includes a helpful map to educate her:
Indians lurk over the border
But that's only the most obvious problem. Here's what else is wrong:
1) Monument Valley as a whole may straddle the Arizona/Utah border, but the famous site in the photo--the Mitten Buttes--is a couple miles north. It's in the sovereign Navajo Nation in southern Utah--neither of which is Arizona. Oops.
2) Monument Valley is world-famous because it's appeared in many old Westerns featuring "savage" Indians. It's possibly the geographic location most associated with Indians.
So what's the message here? Brewer is saying Arizona's Mexican border is indistinguishable from its Indian border. Incredibly, she's directly linking illegal immigrants with Indians.
Dangerous people lurk beyond both borders, she's saying, ready to sweep into Arizona and scalp or behead Americans. Whether they're indigenous Mexicans or indigenous Americans, they're a threat to civilization.
Brewer has made it pretty obvious before that she's targeting the brown-skinned people of the Americas. But never has she made it so crystal clear.
For more on the American/Mexican clash, see Arizona Laws = Manifest Insanity and Arizona Laws = Clash of Civilizations. For more on how immigrants represent Indians, see "Most Mexicans Are Indians" and Arizona's Laws Target the Indigenous.
Below: What might happen if we don't seal the Arizona/Utah border.
3 comments:
This post seems kind of speculative. First, who, exactly, picked out the picture? In all likelihood it wasn't Brewer herself - I would think it would be either some staffer of hers, or an employee of whatever web design firm produced the site.
Secondly, and more importantly, why did they pick out the picture? Did they simply want an image of a desert location? Or did they specifically choose the picture, knowing where it was taken? Personally, I was unfamiliar with that landmark - but then again, I live in a whole different part of the country, and I've never been to Arizona. So for a resident of the Southwest it could be more recognizable.
I was blaming Brewer as Arizona's chief executive, not as a web designer. She's ultimately responsible for everything the state government does on her watch.
Monument Valley is perhaps the most recognizable landscape in the Southwest after the Grand Canyon. People have seen it in many movies, TV shows, commercials, print ads, and so forth and so on. As any good web designer would know, it's intimately associated with the Wild West in general and Indians in particular.
It would've been easy to find a stock photograph of the actual Arizona/Mexico border or a random desert scene. That Brewer or her web designer chose a landscape associated with the "untamed" frontier and "savage" Indians is highly suspect. Even if it was an unconscious choice, it says something about the mentality of the people involved.
Sites like this usually get vetted by several layers of management, so let's not blame some "lone designer." Dozens of people--most of them conservative supporters of Brewer and the new immigration law--must've seen and approved this image. All these people found nothing wrong with equating illegal immigrants and Indians.
I can't find many examples of movies filmed on that site which feature "savage Indians".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_appearances_of_Monument_Valley_in_the_media#Film
Of the movies listed, only two feature "savage indians" - Stagecoach and Back to the Future. Many of them, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, don't have any Indian characters at all. Is this list missing anything?
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