Images of Native Americans in Rick

Griffin’s Early Psychedelic Posters

MICHAEL PARKE-TAYLOR

Native Americans and Hippie Utopia

RED MAN” PROCLAIMED THE COVER STORY OF

“R
ETURN OF THE
Life magazine, December 1, 1967. Despite the mislead-
ing title, which evoked a long-standing myth of “the
Vanishing Indian” disappearing “either through violent eradication or
total assimilation, based on a mistaken assumption that he is unable
to exist alongside contemporary Americans in modern society,” the
point of the report was to put America on notice that the so-called
“Red Man” was again a potent force (Hahn 204). That this had
already transpired within the sixties counterculture was underscored
by one of the issue’s articles: “Happy Hippie Hunting Ground.”
Actor Julie Christie, seated cross-legged and dressed in a stereotyped
Native American costume, was photographed surrounded by psyche-
delic posters depicting images of Native Americans (Richman 66).
What some two years earlier had been understood as the province of
the initiated hippie was now a mass fashion statement. Even the rich
and famous, adorned in buckskin and beads, had “gone Indian” as
just one manifestation of “hippie chic.”
This phenomenon, played out in mainstream America, may be
considered a superficial appropriation of hippie culture by “straight”
society. But even more, the donning of either stereotyped or authen-
tic Native American garb by celebrities, for example, Julie Christie,
Twiggy, and Micky Dolenz of the Monkees (who famously wore a

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 53, No. 5, 2020

© 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC

1105
1106 Michael Parke-Taylor

spectacular Indian headdress at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967),

is today considered to be a deplorable act of cultural appropriation.
The hippie generation, born in the post-War era, was raised on dee-
ply offensive popular culture images of Native Americans that satu-
rated the mass media. These negative images came in a wide range of
forms, for example western movies and television programs, comic
books, advertisements, and children’s toys and games. They often
depicted Native Americans with tomahawks and scalping knives in
hand, when in fact “throughout U.S. history, Euro-Americans com-
mitted countless acts of violence against Native people” (Hirschfelder
and Molin). From a cultural context of extreme white privilege that
racialized Native peoples without even thinking, the counterculture
emerged with a different, more positive perspective.
But the counterculture’s embrace of Native American culture was
not always seen in a positive light at the time. First Nations Cree
folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie voiced her disapproval in a stinging
interview given in 1967 during the so-called Summer of Love: “The
white people never seem to realize they cannot suck the soul out of a
race. The ones with the sweetest intentions are the worst soul suckers.
It’s the weirdest vampire idea. It’s very perverted . . . that people are
always trying to identify with a race they’ve conquered” (Bryan 10).
Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Invention also expressed a cynical
opinion of Native American appropriation by hippies during the
Summer of Love. While recording We’re Only in It for the Money,
Zappa was interviewed by Jazz & Pop magazine: “A lot of people
think that a new political movement, the ideal new political move-
ment, is to bust it all up and start all over again, with tribes, and
feathers in your hair, and everybody loves everybody else. That’s a
lie! Those kids don’t love each other, they’re into that because it’s
like another club—the modern-day equivalent of a street gang” (Jack
108).
But what conditions prompted the counterculture to value the
Native American as a role model for an alternative society and then
incorporate this into visual culture in the first place? One must dis-
tinguish between the type of countercultural appropriation practiced
by psychedelic poster artists and those attempts to usurp Native
American identity about which Buffy Sainte-Marie and Frank Zappa
complained. Why were images of Native Americans central to the
language of the counterculture and in particular the psychedelic
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1107

poster from 1966–70? This study will focus on the work of Rick
Griffin (1944–91), who made psychedelic posters during the period
when the Native American “Red Power” movement was struggling
to reclaim land and fishing rights. Griffin appropriated white Anglo
nineteenth-century representations of Native Americans in order to
make them align with hippie beliefs and attitudes. This narrative
takes place against a mid-sixties backdrop of deep social and political
unrest in the United States marked by the fight for Civil Rights and
the anti-Vietnam War movement. As fifties beatnik culture morphed
into sixties counterculture, the alienated young people of America
sought for a completely new status quo—nothing less than a com-
plete revolution in society.
For the nascent counterculture of the mid-sixties, Native Ameri-
cans represented the perfect symbol of those marginalized and perse-
cuted in contemporary American society. Native Americans had a
long history of fighting all levels of government not just for their
basic human rights but also for their very existence. The restoration
of Native American power in the sixties meant overcoming centuries
of federal, state, and local government policies that attempted to
eradicate Native American cultures and tribal organizations. By the
sixties, Native American activists were becoming organized to
demand action on numerous issues from treaty rights observance to
tribal sovereignty and self-government. In addition to seeking greater
economic power and political independence, Native Americans fought
against government interference with their cultural practices and
spiritual observances. These issues reached a boiling point during the
years marked by the sixties counterculture and its immediate after-
math as Native American militants marched, demonstrated, and
occupied spaces. Protests, such as the “fish-in” conflict over fishing
rights at Frank’s Landing on the Nisqually River in the Pacific
Northwest (1968), the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco
Bay (1969–71), the building takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
in Washington, DC (1972), and the Wounded Knee incident on the
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota (1973), attracted
wide media coverage during the same period when hippies were
attracted to the Native American cause.
First Nations Dakota historian Philip J. Deloria, in his ground-
breaking 1998 book Playing Indian, analyzes the historical conditions
that have repeatedly led Americans to appropriate the cultural
1108 Michael Parke-Taylor

heritage of Native Americans. He observes: “Whenever white Ameri-

cans have confronted crises of identity, some of them have inevitably
turned to Indians” (156). The complexity of identity politics whereby
hippies assumed aspects of Native American culture may be under-
stood in the context of the definition of “counterculture” as proposed
by cultural historians Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle:

It was an inherently unstable collection of attitudes, tendencies,

postures, gestures, “lifestyles,” ideals, visions, hedonistic pleasures,
moralisms, negations, and affirmations. These roles were played by
people who defined themselves first by what they were not, and
then, only after having cleared that essential ground of identity,
began to conceive anew what they were. What they were was what
they might become—more a process than a product, and thus
more a direction or motion than a movement.
(10)

The correlation between the hippies’ quest for an alternative soci-

ety in America independent of authority and their embrace of Native
American culture was not coincidental. As W. J. Rorabaugh explains,
“To hippies, Indians were pure in spirit, primitives liberated from
Western civilization, and true Americans. As part of the search for
authenticity, the counterculture tried to gain depth by absorbing
others’ wisdom” (63). What often began as a fascination with Native
American culture on tribal, ecological, spiritual, communal, fashion,
and drug-based levels became in some cases a genuine engagement
with contemporary Native American issues. The stage for this was set
initially in the American West—a place with a long-standing history
of utopian thought where one could start over from scratch: “Hippies
and cowboys were part of the same self-perpetuating mythos of the
West as a platform for freedom, mobility, self-determination, and
antiauthority” (Auther and Lerner xxx). And, if hippies behaved like
Native Americans, they might achieve something radically different
from the current manners and mores of sixties middle-class America.
Concurrent with the notion of society reimagined through the
agency of Native Americans (and various non-Western cultures), as
well as by the use of psychedelic drugs like LSD, came new forms of
music. Just as the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the fifties is identified
with rebellious juveniles, so the rise of psychedelic music from the
mid-sixties is associated with white middle-class disaffected youth.
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1109

The epicenter was San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury

district, where the first psychedelic rock groups flourished. In tandem
with this was the advent, in 1965, of the psychedelic rock concert
poster to advertise events. Their design has generally been associated
with the so-called “Big Five” San Francisco artists who, in addition
to Rick Griffin, included Wes Wilson (1937–2020), Stanley “Mouse”
Miller (b. 1940), Alton Kelley (1940–2008), and Victor Moscoso (b.
1936). By the time Griffin burst onto the poster scene at the begin-
ning of 1967, Native Americans had already been well represented in
posters by Wilson, Mouse, and Kelley. Wilson’s Tribal Stomp from
February 19, 1966, featuring a photograph of Sioux Chiefs by Edward
S. Curtis (1868–1952), may be considered the first psychedelic poster
to deploy a depiction of a Native American (Parke-Taylor 225).

Setting the Scene: America Needs Indians

“America Needs Indians.” Thus, Stewart Brand (b. 1938) titled the
multimedia light and sound “sensorium” that he produced with
architect Zach Stewart for the opening evening of the Trips Festival
in San Francisco on Friday, January 21, 1966. This event, which took
place only a few weeks before Wilson’s Tribal Stomp poster, would be
a catalytic moment in countercultural history and help create the con-
text for the hippie attraction to Native Americans and the subsequent
use of imagery involving Native Americans on psychedelic posters.
“America Needs Indians” was the product of three years of inten-
sive work. A graduate of design at the San Francisco Art Institute
and photography at San Francisco State University, Brand had
become deeply sympathetic with Native American culture. From
1963–65, he traveled to various Indian reservations in the United
States to research and photograph Indian life. With an almost mis-
sionary zeal, Brand felt it necessary to bring Native Americans to the
attention of white people across America and presented a traveling
version of “America Needs Indians” at various college campuses and
community theaters in 1965. After falling in with Ken Kesey and
the Merry Pranksters in San Francisco, it was Brand’s brainchild with
artist Ramon Sender Barayon, who was Director of the San Francisco
Tape Music Center, to organize the three-day Trips Festival at Long-
shoremen’s Hall.
1110 Michael Parke-Taylor

What exactly was “America Needs Indians?” A program for the

Trips Festival claimed that Brand’s show would consist of “600
slides, 2 Movies, 4 Sound Tracks” along with “Flowers, Food, Rock
‘n roll, Eagle Bone Whistle, Thunderstorm, Live Cheyenne Tipi,
Chippewas, Senecas, Papagoes, Wascoes, Navahoes, Hopi, Ponca,
Ottowa [sic], Cherokee, Sioux, Blackfeet, Tlingit, Makah, Pomo,
Miwuk & anthropologists” (Grushkin 115). Key to understanding
what Brand wanted his sound and light show to convey was the
desire that it would be a “peyote meeting without peyote” (Smith
50). This was in keeping with the Trips Festival concept, following
the success of the Merry Pranksters’ mixed media electronic and
sound extravaganza Acid Tests, which hoped to enhance (if not repli-
cate) the experience of hallucinogenic drugs. Sherry Smith explains,
Brand “juxtaposed white mythic imagery of Indians with pho-
tographs of actual Indian people, many from his own collections
taken on Warm Springs, Blackfoot, Navajo, Hopi, Tohono Odham,
and other Indian reservations. He used Edward Curtis photographs
and live performances by Indian groups. Audiotapes played native
music, storytelling, peyote songs and Navajo chanting” (50).
Rock performance impresario Chet Helms, who was about to pro-
duce dance concerts of consequence at the Fillmore Auditorium and
later the Avalon Ballroom, described his experience of “America
Needs Indians”: “One of the local events that had affected everything,
including posters, for that matter . . . was the America Needs Indians
Sensorium . . . We talked at that time about happenings and we
talked about an environmental theatre . . . that by tailoring or cus-
tomizing an environment, that you could have a desired emotional
output” (qtd. in Erlewine 24). Helms not only incorporated these
ideas into dance concerts geared to certain themes (Tribal Stomp) and
later to psychedelic light shows that enveloped the audience, he was
also instrumental in the choice of imagery found on many of the early
psychedelic posters. One of his favorite books was William Brandon’s
The American Heritage Book of Indians, which he mined for images of
historic Native American figures. Helms advised Wes Wilson to use
the Edward Curtis photo published in Brandon’s book for the Tribal
Stomp poster (Brandon 356). He also instructed Wilson to make a
poster for the Avalon Ballroom (November 22–23, 1966) using a
photo in the book depicting the First Nations Canadian who would
become one of the most famous figures to be reproduced in rock
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1111

poster history when his image was adopted by the Family Dog for
their logo on all subsequent Family Dog posters (Brandon 279).
Helms later directed poster artists Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley to
Brandon’s book, which they used as a sourcebook for Native Ameri-
can imagery (as did Rick Griffin somewhat later) for two posters dur-
ing 1966 (Brandon 257, 332). By the end of 1966, when Rick
Griffin arrived in San Francisco and started to make posters, Native
Americans had already been featured on several psychedelic posters.
With their example in mind, Griffin determined to take the subject
deeper with his first posters in the psychedelic context.

Rick Griffin: From Surfer to Pop Culture Psychedelic

Like many of his teenage contemporaries, Griffin was influenced by

Mad Magazine during his high school years. This began at Narbonne
High School in Los Angeles, where he decorated the notebooks of his
fellow students with Don Martin-like cartoons. After graduating
from Palos Verdes High School in 1962, he began work with Surfer
magazine. A devotee of popular and surf culture, Griffin invented a
cartoon character called Murphy whose surfing adventures generated a
devoted following. Extremely gifted as a draughtsman, Griffin fol-
lowed his inclination to become an artist. In 1963, he went to art
school at Los Angeles Harbor Community College, where he lasted
for one semester. This was followed with a stint in 1964 at the
Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts—
CalArts in Valencia). There he found the atmosphere anathema to the
direction he wished to follow: “I was having trouble at art school,
because they were critical of my approach to art and referred to me as
a mere cartoonist and told me that I should abandon all my former
approaches and self-training in art and become a true artist and paint
Abstract Impressionist paintings” (qtd. in Grady 80).
Griffin dropped out of art school in late 1965 and lived a peri-
patetic lifestyle in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and eventually San
Blas, Mexico. By the time he moved to San Francisco via Los Angeles
in late 1966, he would become the last member of the Big Five
artists to arrive on the poster scene. His first three posters from early
1967, forming the subject of this study, demonstrate an overwhelm-
ing tour de force mixture of typefaces of various sizes and styles that
1112 Michael Parke-Taylor

show evidence of a proficiency in this aspect of poster design that

would distinguish his career. Griffin recalls:

Back in the surf era, I had done a lot of lettering . . . on drumheads

for various surf bands . . . I developed this kind of beatnik
approach to lettering and had a lot of examples of that in my port-
folio to art school. They told me that if I was going to go into
commercial art, I had to learn how to do lettering the right way,
and learn the formal-type styles and all sorts of tedious bullshit
like that. That was another reason I left art school: I had developed
this approach to art, which I just applied to my posters.
(qtd. in Grady 81)

Griffin’s experiments with various typefaces were critical to his work.

As early as July 1967, art historian Thomas Albright had already
noted “Griffin uses all the great old type faces—Gold Rush, Bank
Note, P.T. Barnum and Jim Crow Old Bowery—with color often
adding an op shimmer” (41).

Rick Griffin’s First Poster: The New Improved Psychedelic

Shop

The Psychedelic Shop, one of the first “head shops” in the Haight to
sell paraphernalia related to the dope scene, opened in San Francisco
on January 3, 1966. Operated by brothers Ron and Jay Thelin and
located at 1535 Haight Street, the store was a stone’s throw from the
famous corner of Haight-Ashbury (Henke and Puterbaugh 82). Mark-
ing its first anniversary in January 1967, the Thelin brothers pre-
sented an “Art Show” by the Jook Savages, a bohemian group of
artist–musicians from Los Angeles. Rick Griffin, who transitioned
from surf culture to the counterculture via association with the Jook
Savages, had moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco by late 1966.
In an interview conducted in 1989, Griffin remembered his poster
beginnings:

The Jook Savages at the Psychedelic Shop was my first San Fran-
cisco poster . . . I did this one poster for my particular tribe. We
exhibited our art there. Most of the other artists in the Jook Sav-
ages were not graphic artists: they were assemblage and collage
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1113

artists . . . There were actually about 20 of us. We were a self-

styled tribe, a musical family. People on the scene saw the poster
and invited me to start doing posters for the ballrooms. So I stum-
bled on that. It was purely accidental. I didn’t go to San Francisco
to be a poster artist; I went there to collect the posters.
(Grady 80)

While artwork created by the Jook Savages remains obscure, the

group was immortalized by Griffin in his first poster: The New
Improved Psychedelic Shop (Figure 1). Walter Medeiros, one of the fore-
most chroniclers of the Haight-Ashbury scene and an early scholar of
psychedelic rock posters, recalls that some of the Jook Savages “were
very serious in their identification with Indians” (“Griffin” 74). Com-
missioned by the Thelin brothers and connected to Jook Savage activ-
ity, Griffin’s poster was loaded with more references to Native
Americans than any psychedelic poster to date. Griffin’s interest in
Native Americans went deep and may be traced to his youth when
his father, an amateur archeologist, stimulated his son’s imagination
by taking him to “archaeological sites and ghost-towns of the South-
west,” where he gained an appreciation for “the images, lore and feel-
ing of the American West” (Medeiros, “Mapping” 331). While he
never divulged the iconographic sources of the imagery he used in
this poster, Griffin acknowledged an influence from The Charlatans
famous poster The Seed advertising their residency at the Red Dog
Saloon, Virginia City, Nevada, June 1–15, 1965. The Seed is consid-
ered to be the progenitor of all psychedelic posters. Griffin would
have appreciated George Hunter’s horror-vacui hand-made lettering
from old typefaces and Michael Ferguson’s cartoon-like drawing style
featuring caricature heads of the members of the band—all in keep-
ing with their adoption of a Wild West image: “I had developed a
similar style as that Charlatan poster was drawn in, the Victorian . . .
I made those drawings look like old labels and the kind of engravings
you find on dollar bills. That was an art that really appealed to me.
So I did this poster for the Jook Savages and it featured actual cut-
out use of western engravings and the basic dollar bill border
approach with wild, out-of-control lettering” (qtd. in Grady 81).
Griffin’s New Improved Psychedelic Shop adopts a novel approach to
the composition of a psychedelic poster by deploying border decora-
tion surrounding the central text and images to reflect and thus add
1114 Michael Parke-Taylor

FIGURE 1. Rick Griffin, The New Improved Psychedelic Shop and Jook Savage
Art Show, Jan. 1967. Psychedelic Shop, San Francisco. Offset lithograph pos-
ter, 20 9 14 in. (50.7 9 35.4 cm). Private Collection. [Color figure can be
viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

commentary to Native American themes. Here, one may identify var-

ious elements associated with Indian lore such as feathers, a quiver of
arrows, moccasins, a powder horn, a patterned pouch, corn, kachina
dolls, gourd rattles, a dream catcher, and a god’s eye. There are also
obvious references to dope with smoking pipes, magic mushrooms,
and marijuana leaves illustrated with a banner at lower left advising:
“For Karmic Releaf”—a typical Griffin pun.
Given Griffin’s fascination with advertising images and slogans
(“The New Improved Psychedelic Shop”), his offbeat humor may have
extended to a visual pun on the word “savage” (a racist term not used
by Griffin but current in the popular culture of the day). He
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1115

FIGURE 2. J. W. Evans (American, fl. 1890) (after Frederic Remington), The

Charge on the Sun-Pole, wood engraving reproduced in The Century Magazine
vol. 39, issue 5, Mar. 1890, p. 755. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyon-
linelibrary.com]

juxtaposes an image of enthusiastic warriors on horseback with the

words “Jook Savage” to suggest perhaps that speed is necessary to
visit the Jook Savage Art Show before it closed. Griffin used an illus-
tration from the March 1890 issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly
Magazine, a wood engraving by J. W. Evans after the painting The
Charge on the Sun-Pole, c. 1890 (National Cowboy and Western Her-
itage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) by Frederic Remington
(1861–1909), the famous artist of the western frontier (Schwatka
755) (Figure 2).
Although Native Americans appear regularly in Remington’s
image repertory, he was not a sympathetic observer of Indian lore and
legends (Barter 81–83; 91–94). Griffin’s use of this illustration is a
tongue-in-cheek take on Remington’s stereotypical and cliched view
of Native Americans, a trope later made familiar via television and
the cinema. Griffin’s selection of the image undermines the unfettered
“savagery” and danger that Remington originally intended to com-
municate. The charging warriors lead visually in the poster to an
image of a standing figure who has not been identified in the
1116 Michael Parke-Taylor

FIGURE 3. James Wallace Black (American, 1825–1896), Frank Hamilton

Cushing dressed in Zuni Costume, 1882, gelatin silver print, Braun Research
Library Collection, Autry Museum, Los Angeles, P.36428. [Color figure can
be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

psychedelic poster literature until now: Frank Hamilton Cushing

(1857–1900). A celebrated American anthropologist and ethnologist,
Cushing is costumed like a Zuni Indian from New Mexico. He was
photographed full-length in his Zuni outfit in 1882 by the Boston
photographer James Wallace Black (1825–96) (Figure 3). This gela-
tin silver print was the basis for the wood-engraved portrait of Cush-
ing by an unidentified artist published in The Century Magazine and
subsequently used by Griffin (Baxter 528) (Figure 4).
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1117

FIGURE 4. Unknown, Frank Hamilton Cushing, 1882, wood engraving repro-

duced in The Century Magazine vol. 24, issue 45, Aug. 1882, p. 528 and
Unknown, Governor Hai-Ya-Ah-Tsai-Hi (Pedro Pino), wood engraving
reproduced in The Century Magazine vol. 24, issue 45, Aug. 1882, p. 529.
[Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Cushing was the first ethnologist to assume Native American dress

and identity, pioneering the anthropological method of “participant
observation.” As curator of the ethnological department of the
National Museum in Washington, DC, Cushing traveled to the Zuni
Pueblo where he lived from 1879–84, studying Zuni culture first-
hand. Cushing’s fame led him to be the subject of a large portrait in
Zuni garb painted by Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) in 1895 (Gil-
crease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma).
In Griffin’s poster, the enigmatic text “It Furthers One to Be” (a
partial quote lifted from the Chinese I Ching or Classic of Changes, c.
10th–4th centuries BCE) is located close to Cushing’s head, as if the
words were coming from his mouth. Griffin thus suggests that the
adoption of Native American dress and ways as practiced by Cushing
and the Jook Savages was a worthy enterprise. That Cushing looked
like a Haight-Ashbury hippie and had “gone native” was not lost on
Griffin, who shortly after the Psychedelic Shop poster designed a
record album cover with his wife Ida for the LP West-Coast Love-In,
1118 Michael Parke-Taylor

FIGURE 5. John K. Hillers, Portrait (Front) of Lai-Yu-Ah-Tsai-Lun-Kya in

Native Dress with Ornaments, 1879, photograph. National Anthropological
Archives, Smithsonian Institution, BAE GN 02234A 06370400.

which referenced the Elysian Park Love-In in Los Angeles on March

26, 1967. Here, two hippies (who appear to be idealized portraits of
the Griffins) lounge in a psychedelic landscape in Native American
garb with the male fully dressed in moccasins, buckskin, and beads.
Appropriating native costume was now commonplace in hippie cir-
cles—and in the case of Griffin, his fantasy self-portrait not only
emulates Cushing’s look, but also may be a self-identification with
Cushing’s admiration for Native Americans. Notwithstanding good
intentions, from a contemporary perspective Griffin appropriates
Cushing’s cultural misappropriation.
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1119

FIGURE 6. Unknown, Lai-Yu-Ah-Tsai-Lun-Kya, wood engraving reproduced

in The Century Magazine, vol. 24, issue 45, Aug. 1882, p. 534. [Color figure
can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

While at Zuni Pueblo, Cushing developed deep tribal friendships

and in 1881 received the name Tenatsali (“medicine flower”) upon
initiation into the Priesthood of the Bow. In 1882, he created a
media sensation when he arranged for five Zuni and a Hopi to visit
Boston and Washington, DC, where they met President Chester A.
Arthur. Photographs were taken in Washington, DC, of both the
group and individuals by John K. Hillers (1843–1925), staff photog-
rapher in the Bureau of Ethnology, who would have met Cushing
when photographing the Southwest with the first James Stevenson
expedition that accompanied Cushing to Zuni Pueblo in 1879.
1120 Michael Parke-Taylor

FIGURE 7. John K. Hillers, Portrait (Front) of Governor Hai-Ya-Ah-Tsai-Hi

or Pedro Pino in Native Dress with Concha Belt and Ornaments, 1879, photo-
graph. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, BAE
GN 02232A 06370000.

At the top left of Griffin’s poster is a reproduction of a wood

engraving after Hillers’s photograph of Lai-Yu-Ah-Tsai-Lun-Kya
(Figures 5 and 6), while at top right Griffin appropriated a wood
engraving after Hillers’s photograph of the Governor of the Zuni
Pueblo (from 1830–78): Hai-Ya-Ah-Tsai-Hi (also known as Pedro
Pino) (Figures 7 and 4). The source Griffin consulted for the wood
engravings of Cushing and the Zunis was once again The Century
Magazine (Baxter 529, 534). While in Boston, a group photograph
was taken by James Wallace Black at the same session where he pho-
tographed Cushing (Figure 8).
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1121

FIGURE 8. James Wallace Black, Frank Hamilton Cushing with Lai-Yu-Ah-

Tsai-Lun-Kya, Naiyutchi, Palowahtiwa, Kiasiwa, and Nanake, 1882, albumen
silver print, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, NPG.95.23.
[Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

The Human Be-In, San Francisco 1967

Griffin’s artistic talent demonstrated in the poster for the Psychedelic

Shop was recognized by his peers. No doubt his use of Native Ameri-
can references was seen to be fully in keeping with what the organiz-
ers had in mind for the forthcoming Human Be-In. Within days of
completing the Psychedelic Shop poster, Griffin began work on his
second commissioned poster, Pow-Wow—A Gathering of the Tribes for
a Human Be-In, to be held on Saturday, January 14, 1967, at the Polo
Grounds near the Haight in Golden Gate Park (Figure 9). In addi-
tion to the headline title, chosen by the organizers, Griffin neatly
recorded in legible, hand-drawn psychedelic lettering those who were
to speak at the event. The names of “all the luminaries of the Beatnik
underground,” as Griffin called them, are symmetrically arranged on
either side of the central image of a Native American on horseback
waving a painted buffalo robe in one hand and holding an electric
guitar in the other (Stevens 330). Emerging from the clouded heavens
1122 Michael Parke-Taylor

FIGURE 9. Rick Griffin, Pow-Wow—A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human

Be-In, 14 Jan. 1967 (AOR 2.215). Polo Grounds, Golden Gate Park, San
Francisco. Offset lithograph poster, 20 9 14 in. (50.8 9 35.5 cm). Private
Collection. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

is an eagle’s talon clutching two crossed bolts of lightning. The

underground drug chemist and soundman for the Grateful Dead,
Augustus Owsley Stanley III, was directly inspired by this imagery
on the poster to name a type of LSD “White Lightning” (a humorous
evocation of high-proof distilled spirits prohibited in the United
States from 1920–33) which he manufactured and distributed freely
at the event (Greenfield 85). LSD usage was already widespread in the
counterculture and was seen as a catalyst for positive change in the
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1123

FIGURE 10. Frederic Remington (American, 1861–1909), Friendly Scout Sig-

naling the Main Column, wood engraving reproduced in The Century Maga-
zine, vol. 41, issue 5, Mar. 1891, p. 648. [Color figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

hippies’ vision of a utopian society modeled on the concept of Cana-

dian visionary Marshall McLuhan’s “global village.”
The central and arresting focus of the poster is the Native Ameri-
can on horseback. While the source of this image has been previously
misidentified generically as an historical photograph, Griffin once
again looked to Frederic Remington for inspiration, as he had done
recently with his Psychedelic Shop poster. Executed by Remington
after his ink and wash drawing of the same subject, the wood engrav-
ing A Friendly Scout Signaling the Main Column was published initially
1124 Michael Parke-Taylor

in the March 1891 issue of The Century Magazine (Figure 10). Modi-
fying a Remington wood engraving of a stereotypical Native Ameri-
can, Griffin substituted an electric guitar for a rifle (Bourke 648).
Beat poet Gary Snyder, writing in 1967, was the first to notice the
substitution of the carbine for the guitar, but referred to Reming-
ton’s engraving as simply “an old etching” without identifying the
source (Gray 44).
Art historian Mark Watson, who has written about the multiple
meanings embedded in this poster, saw the depiction of the Native
American holding a guitar as key to understanding the broader social
implications of Griffin’s poster and the Be-In in general: “Together,
the Indian and the guitar—a metonym for rock music—put forth the
distinctive version of ‘techno-primitivism’ that structured countercul-
tural political aesthetics” (212–13). Following McLuhan’s prediction
of a future global village based on “electronic re-tribalization”
whereby society would be connected without borders, the countercul-
ture at the same time embraced the supposed purity of Native Ameri-
can culture as a model for behavior with respect not only to
ecological issues but also spiritual/religious realms. Watson considers
that the theory of electronic re-tribalization

linked together the counterculture’s embrace of electric rock

music, the synesthetic tribal experience of LSD, and its conception
of real politics as what The Oracle called the “community of the
tribe.” It also provided an up-to-date yet futuristic form of primi-
tivism for the counterculture, in which an embrace of premodern
tribal (especially Native American) fashion, communalism, drum-
ming, peyote and magic mushrooms, rituals, and other cultural
fragments could—when taken up by the primarily white youth
underground—express the technology-driven new epoch prophe-
sied at the Human Be-In, in print organs like The Oracle, and in
the art, music, and expanded visual culture of the period.
(215)

Griffin’s Native American scout symbolically signals the hippie

tribes in order to guide them to the Be-In’s location. The event was
for the initiated who would be familiar with the roster of countercul-
tural worthies named on the poster. In general, the left column lists
the activists while the right column features the poets/writers,
although in some cases the person might belong to both camps.
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1125

Associated by similar typefaces across the page, Timothy Leary, the

self-styled LSD guru, is thus linked with Allen Ginsberg, who had
morphed from Beat poet to spokesman for the hippie generation.
Richard Alpert, Leary’s associate and right-hand man, is opposite
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat writer/publisher and owner of San Fran-
cisco’s famed City Lights Bookstore. Comedian/activist Dick Gregory
is listed, but he could not attend the event as he was occupied at a
Pacific Northwest “fish-in” advocating Native Americans’ treaty
rights. He is paralleled with Gary Snyder, anthropologist and Beat
poet whose commitment to Native American issues ran deep. Histo-
rian Jay Stevens notes: “Of the older Beats, only Gary Snyder had rec-
ognized that the Native Americans, particularly in their relationship
with the earth, had as much to offer the children of the Fifties as the
roshis and gurus of the East” (250). Returning to the left column,
Lenore Kandel is listed because her publication of erotic poems The
Love Book was the focus of a police raid for obscene literature at the
Psychedelic Shop on November 15, 1966. By the end of May 1967,
she had sold more than 20,000 copies thanks to this notoriety. Kan-
del is paired on the right column with Michael McClure, well-
respected Beat poet/writer/playwright/novelist on the west coast scene
and known for his controversial 1965 play The Beard. Below Kandel
is the Berkeley student political activist Jerry Rubin, noteworthy here
since a motivating agenda for the Be-In on the part of the Haight-
Ashbury committee (particularly Allen Cohen, editor of the Oracle)
was to align the hippies with the organizational abilities of the stu-
dent radical Left. Rubin is paired with the poet Robert Baker, who
apparently amused the Be-In crowd with his recitation of “The Night
Before Christmas” peppered with references to marijuana and LSD.
Finally, “all San Francisco Rock Bands” are listed at the bottom
left, almost as an afterthought when in fact the music must have been
a major draw. In this call for “all” bands, those who played that day
were Quicksilver Messenger Service, Loading Zone, Sir Douglas
Quintet, and Pat Kilroy backed by Country Joe and the Fish. Crowd
favorites Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane played with Dizzy
Gillespie and Charles Lloyd, both of whom sat in for a few numbers.
Surprisingly, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Com-
pany did not perform. Last to be listed was a local Haight personality
named Buddha (Henry Jefferson Sudduth) who emceed the event and
perhaps conjured hope from the faithful that the spirit of the other
1126 Michael Parke-Taylor

Buddha might also be in attendance. The Be-In proved to be a highly

successful and peaceful gathering, attracting a crowd conservatively
estimated at more than 20,000 people—a clear indication that San
Francisco by early 1967 was overwhelmingly hippie ground zero.

Renaissance or Die

The January 1966 issue of the Oracle was devoted to the Be-In and its
cover basically reproduced another poster for the event by Stanley
Mouse and Michael Bowen (with photography by Casey Sonnabend).
The captivating image was of an Eastern Indian saddhu (wandering
Indian holy man) with a third eye who represents the inward vita con-
templative. This is in comparison with the Be-In poster’s vita activa of
Griffin’s Native American—both Eastern and Western Indigenous
types together offering different pathways to wisdom for the hippie
seeking enlightenment. The new society was to be based on an array
of religions and ways of life, guided not only by the spirituality of
Native Americans but also by aspects of Hinduism, Zen Buddhism,
Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
For the same January issue of the Oracle, Griffin was invited to
design a double-paged illustration (which was also released simulta-
neously as an Oracle Co-op Poster) for Allen Ginsberg’s text Renais-
sance or Die representing a mystic East/West dialogue laid out in axial
symmetry—a hallmark of Griffin’s style (Figure 11). Of note is a
standing Native American in full regalia on the left page juxtaposed
to the Eastern seer in a similar oval on the right. But of more conse-
quence on the left page is Griffin’s use of an engraved portrait after a
lithograph by Charles Bird King (1785–1862) of Sequoyah, the
famous inventor in 1821 of the Cherokee alphabet. A reproduction of
the portrait print of Sequoya may be found in The American Heritage
Book of Indians (Brandon 221). Since the poster artists were constantly
in contact, and in some cases collaborated on posters together, it is
likely that Mouse and Kelley directed Griffin to this book given the
number of times they used it for source material. In the original
print, Sequoya points to the syllabary that made it possible for the
first time in recorded history for an Indigenous people to be able to
read and write in their own language. Griffin has changed the image
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1127

FIGURE 11. Rick Griffin “Renaissance or Die,” The San Francisco Oracle, 5
Jan. 1967, pp. 12–13. The poster that was released at the same time mea-
sures 17 9 22 inches (43.1 9 55.8 cm) on butcher paper with the imprint
‘Oracle Co-op Poster.’ [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.
com]

so that the syllabary is removed and Sequoyah instead points to Allen

Ginsberg’s name.
To add a further layer to the Native American references in this
work, at the lower border of the design, Griffin has once again mined
The Century Magazine for an illustration of Frank Hamilton Cushing
and the Zuni Indians (Figure 12). This time he borrowed a detail
from a wood engraving by Frank French (1850–1933) after a gouache
by William Ladd Taylor (1854–1926) depicting the Zunis at the
Paint-and-Clay Club Boston in 1882 (Sylvester 531) (Figure 13).
William Ladd Taylor based his gouache on the poses of Cushing and
the Zuni Indians that he found in the group photograph taken by
James Wallace Black (Figure 8).
Griffin manipulates the image so that Cushing, seen at center bot-
tom left, and the group at center bottom right of his illustration,
appear to be grabbing the stems of hookah pipes. A possible homage
to Chet Helms may be the interpolation with the Zuni group of the
small portrait of the First Nations Canadian whose appearance was by
1128 Michael Parke-Taylor

FIGURE 12. Detail of “Renaissance or Die.”

FIGURE 13. Frank French (American, 1850–1933), 1882, wood engraving

after W. L. Taylor ‘The ‘Song’ Zunis at Paint-and-Clay Club’ reproduced in
the The Century Magazine, vol. 24, no. 45, Aug. 1882, p. 531.
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1129

now a fixture on the Family Dog logo for all posters advertising the
Avalon Ballroom (Parke-Taylor 225).

Rick Griffin’s Legacy: Norman Orr and Custer Died for Our
Sins

Griffin’s appropriation of imagery related to Native Americans no

doubt resulted initially from his awareness of psychedelic posters
issued the year before he arrived in San Francisco. Although he was
not driven by political ideology, Griffin understood the Native Amer-
ican as a beleaguered outsider from American culture. Like many of
his white contemporaries, he identified with this position from per-
sonal feelings of alienation from mainstream culture. While Griffin’s
earliest posters borrowed images of Native Americans from white cul-
ture (for example Remington) that could be accused of being cultur-
ally misappropriate from our present-day perspective, it was the
countercultural context of Griffin’s early posters featuring Native
Americans that influenced another poster artist who did not arrive on
the scene until 1970 to produce posters for Bill Graham’s Fillmore
Auditorium.
Five years younger than Griffin, Norman Orr (b. 1949) looked to
Griffin and the Big Five artists for inspiration. Orr’s first major foray
into the world of commercial poster design was Custer Died for Our
Sins published by The Print Mint, Berkeley in 1970 (Figure 14).
While this work remains relatively unknown today since it was nei-
ther a psychedelic poster nor an advertisement for a dance concert, it
was a tour de force effort. It was also a direct reference to Griffin’s pos-
ter for the Jook Savages Art Show, which Orr owned and loved.
Orr’s title riffs off the slogan “Custer Died for Your Sins,” which
had appeared on bumper stickers and pinback buttons. At that time,
Orr was not aware of a book published in 1969 by Native American
author and activist Vine Deloria Jr. titled Custer Died for Your Sins:
An Indian Manifesto. “Custer binds together implacable foes because
he represented the Ugly American of the last century and he got what
was coming to him. Some years ago, we put out a bumper sticker
which read “Custer Died for Your Sins.” It was originally meant as a
dig at the National Council of Churches—Custer was the blood sacri-
fice for the United States breaking the Sioux treaty. That, at least
1130 Michael Parke-Taylor

FIGURE 14. Norman Orr, Custer Died for Our Sins, 1970. The Print Mint,
Berkeley. Offset lithograph poster, 31.5 9 22.5 inches (80 9 57.1 cm).
Private Collection. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

originally, was the meaning of the slogan.” (148) Although Orr did
not know this reference, his poster resonates with deep sympathy for
Native Americans—even the change of title from the slogan “your
sins” to “our sins” suggests a personal ownership, as a white man, of
crimes perpetuated against America’s Indigenous peoples.
Orr’s poster features the imposing figure of an imperious George
Armstrong Custer assuming a Napoleonic pose. The portrait is based
on a half-plate ambrotype photograph from 1863 attributed to Wil-
liam Frank Browne. The poster is extremely faithful to the
Native Americans & Hippie Utopia 1131

photograph, but Orr’s addition of a halo with Indian heads around

Custer suggests an ironic inversion of the sainthood/martyrdom that
Custer enjoyed initially after his death. The image at left of the
charging warriors on horseback after Frederic Remington is a direct
quotation from Griffin’s Psychedelic Shop poster. Orr’s poster demon-
strates the agency of Griffin’s imagery to foster a younger artist’s deep
engagement with Native Americans.
The December 1, 1967, issue of Life magazine would not have
happened without the enthusiasm hippies expressed for Native Amer-
ican culture. Buffy Sainte-Marie saw “Playing Indian” as cultural
imperialism—an insult to authentic Indian cultures and the realities
of contemporary Native life. Yet it was the counterculture that was
largely responsible for putting Native Americans on the national
radar screen. The importance of the counterculture to the advance-
ment of Native American causes is summed up by historian Sherry L.
Smith in Hippies, Indians, & The Fight for Red Power:

Despite their obvious shortcomings and limitations, though, peo-

ple identified as counterculturists or hippies . . . were among the
first non-Indians of the postwar generation to seek out contact
with Native Americans, learn about their grievances, and join their
call for reform. They did so in large and significant numbers,
which, in turn, caught the attention of the rest of the nation. Far
from being merely superficial and marginal, such attention turned
out to be of great importance to the broader cultural and political
shifts relevant to Indian issues.
(7)

Virtually all images of Native Americans appearing in psychedelic

posters by Rick Griffin and other Big Five artists were representations
of Native Americans selected from Anglo-American nineteenth-cen-
tury sources. No doubt it was their intent to conjure the type of
Native American who symbolized the romantic ideals commensurate
with a hippie vision of utopia. Nevertheless, psychedelic posters,
while mirroring hippie fantasies and utopian dreams, also played a
role in keeping Native Americans, and by extension their contempo-
rary concerns, at the forefront of public discourse.
1132 Michael Parke-Taylor

Notes
Special thanks are due to Greg Castillo for his expertise on the counterculture and for offering
suggestions to improve an early draft of this paper. I have benefited greatly from Sherry
L. Smith’s Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford UP, 2012). Prof. Smith provided
valuable advice, guidance, and encouragement. I am also in debt to psychedelic poster scholar
Eric King for his careful reading of my text. The following have generously given their time
and knowledge to assist me in a variety of ways with this project: Stewart Brand, Barbara Butts,
Stanley “Mouse” Miller, Scott B. Montgomery, Norman Orr, and Donald Rance.

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Michael Parke-Taylor, former Curator of Modern Art at the Art Gallery of

Ontario, is an art historian based in Toronto.