Story Behind Those Wagon Walls

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But some pictures hold their power in what they do not say.

There’s a painting. Soft pastels. Golden light. A young white mother kneels inside a covered wagon, cradling her newborn in linen. Her face is bowed, prayerful over her child. The painting is called A Prayer for a New Life and it was created by artist Morgan Weistling to depict hope, intimacy, and private faith amid hardship. But when the Department of Homeland Security posted it this week, they gave it a different name: New Life in a New Land, and stamped it with the slogan, “Remember your homeland’s heritage.”  The artist came forward to disrupt his vacation to remind the world they did not ask nor were they given permission, and they presumed to re-title it.

They turned one man’s prayer into state propaganda. It shows a white wagon train crossing a field of gold, faces hopeful, shoulders squared toward destiny. The wheels roll onward as if the land itself has always been empty, waiting.

But I am a storyteller. And I was taught to listen to what is left unsaid. And in this case, the image shows the exact whitewashed version of our homeland's heritage reflected in the renaming, even if the artist cannot see it.

Because behind those white canvas wagon walls, something mourns. You don’t see it at first, but it is there. Lurking. Crying. Screaming.

There are the enslaved Africans whose backs were broken to build this “new land,” whose babies were sold, whose names were taken, whose bodies became currency.

There are the Chinese migrants who blasted tunnels and laid tracks through the mountains, only to be cast out under the Chinese Exclusion Act because of racism.

There are the Japanese American families torn from their homes and locked in internment camps behind barbed wire during World War II, for the crime of looking like the enemy.

There are Jewish families and the knowledge that United States corporations were supporting the Nazi parties efforts.

There are the Bracero workers, brought to labor in our fields when we needed them, discarded when we didn’t.

There are the children ripped from their families and forced into residential schools, where their hair was cut, their languages beaten from their mouths, and their identities buried under the lie of “civilization,” to "kill the Indian, save the man."

There are the migrants today, fleeing violence born of U.S. policy, seeking asylum only to be met with cages and cruelty. And there are U.S. citizens, like Francisco Galicia, a Texas-born teenager with a valid ID, who was detained by ICE for nearly a month simply because he had brown skin and a Spanish surname.

So yes, I see the painting. And I see what it refuses to show.

The land looks empty in that image. But it isn’t.

It is full of the things we are told to forget: the buffalo hunted to near extinction to starve Indigenous people into surrender; the treaties broken like brittle leaves under wagon wheels; the Long Walk, the Trail of Tears, the stolen generations, the mass lynching in Mankato, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek. That painting is an illusion, Just beneath the golden grass the land is full of the bones of all who died for that wagon to be there. The silence of the space is the silence of erasure.

The Department of Homeland Security posted that painting to remind us of “our heritage.” But I know what that really means. It means their heritage. A settler’s story. A story of a land built on the backs of enslaved humans on land stolen from murdered humans and claiming those actions were divine.

My homeland's heritage does not look like that canvas.

It looks like a grandmother carrying her grandchild through snow, praying they survive the journey. It looks like unmarked graves of Black and brown bodies. It looks like a mother in a border detention center singing lullabies through her tears. It looks like the face of a young trans person told they do not belong, and the fierce love of a community who says, You do.

Let them post their painting and claim it is beautiful. We know what lies just behind the mask.

Found on the side of a building on Pine Ridge. March, 2023