The tension between Indigenous sovereignty and the US government’s propaganda machinery during the Cold War is at the heart of Jessica Horton’s Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War. Exploring how Indigenous artists engaged with the international exhibition circuit, Horton argues that displays of their work functioned as sites of both cultural erasure and subversion, wherein artists mobilized Indigenous epistemologies and iconographies to assert political and ecological sovereignty. By foregrounding the interrelation between Cold War aesthetic strategies and Indigenous diplomatic practices, Horton aligns with recent scholarship working to decolonize the art history of the Cold War, such as Alice Lovejoy’s Cold War Legacies in the Global South (2021) and Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of the Cold War (2009), which emphasize non-Western artistic responses to Western hegemony. She examines how the assimilationist policies of the Indian Termination Act of 1953 intersected with the establishment of the International Indian Treaty Council of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in 1974. Bridging art history with Indigenous studies and political ecology, Horton asserts that termination and assimilation were part of a broader Cold War project that sought to commodify Indigenous identity within a capitalist framework while facilitating the extraction of natural resources from Native lands.

What could be termed the “artist-as-diplomat” in Horton’s framework encapsulates a paradoxical role—one that embodies both resistance and complicity, embodying the push and pull between survival within a colonial system and the need to reassert Indigenous governance models rooted in relationality with the land, animals, and the cosmos. Rather than merely being pawns in US Cold War propaganda, Indigenous artists became ambassadors of sovereignty, using the same exhibitions and diplomatic tours designed to harness foreign support to assert their political rights and challenge colonial domination. During this period, anticolonial movements were on the rise in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Cold War was not only a contest between the US and the Soviet Union for military supremacy but also a time when these empires’ global authority was being challenged. Indigenous peoples became crucial players in this struggle, using the very tools of cultural diplomacy that the US government employed to assert the earth’s sovereignty, with them as its tenders.

Horton’s discussion of Fritz Scholder’s Indian and Rhinoceros serves as an introduction to the stakes at play, connecting the devastation of Indigenous lands to environmental destruction, violence, and global decolonization movements. The image of the rhinoceros, a species also impacted by colonial exploitation, underscores the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman struggles in the geopolitical landscape of the Cold War. Horton critiques the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the systemic violence of the US government, invoking Indigenous diplomatic systems grounded in kinship and reciprocity with the earth as alternatives to the extractive, colonial systems of modern statecraft.

Chapter one examines the politics of representation in exhibitions such as The Family of Man (1955–1966) and Contemporary American Indian Paintings, wherein artists like Pablita Velarde, Solomon McCombs, and Harrison Begay navigated the fraught terrain of art production during the Cold War. Reading these exhibitions in relation to one another, Horton argues that institutions often presented a sanitized, romanticized version of Native culture, aligning it with Cold War-era ideals such as universal brotherhood, harmony, and peace. The US government, through agencies like the US Information Agency (USIA), curated an image of Indigenous peoples as a pristine part of the American landscape, whose arts and customs could stand as symbols of an idealized, harmonious past. They instrumentalized Indigenous aesthetics to craft an image of the United States as a multicultural democracy, while simultaneously obfuscating the systemic violence enacted upon Native communities.

Chapter two focuses on Fred Stevens’s radical adaptation of sandpainting, a traditionally ephemeral Diné practice, into a permanent medium that doubled as a politically charged intervention in which Diné culture was not a representation of American culture. By incorporating alternative materials such as glue and introducing iconographic elements that destabilized the US Information Agency’s (USIA) capitalist narratives, Stevens transformed sandpainting into an act of visual sovereignty. He did so by adapting Diné cultural expression into a performative medium that balanced public representation with private spiritual traditions, employing distinct imagery for public display while reserving others for sacred, ceremonial contexts. Horton situates Stevens’s work within broader critiques of extractive capitalism, particularly its connections to uranium mining on Diné lands, revealing how Cold War militarization exacerbated environmental injustices within Indigenous territories. By linking Indigenous art to environmental justice movements, Horton expands Cold War art historiography to incorporate the material and ecological stakes of Indigenous resistance. Further, she locates a place for Cold War art historiography within the expanding field of ecocritical art history, wherein scholars such as T.J. Demos (Decolonizing Nature, 2016) and Macarena Gómez-Barris (The Extractive Zone, 2017) have critiqued extractive economies and climate colonialism.

In chapter three, Horton turns to Bertha Stevens’s weaving practice, which embodies Indigenous ecofeminist perspectives and engages in cross-cultural dialogue with weavers from Scotland, Turkey, and Chile. Through oral histories and material analysis, Horton reconstructs how Stevens’s textiles functioned as diplomatic artifacts, fostering transnational solidarities with Mapuche and other Indigenous weavers engaged in parallel struggles against colonial dispossession. She contextualizes these exchanges within global ecofeminist movements, demonstrating how Indigenous environmental ethics intersected with antipatriarchal resistance worldwide. Drawing from theorists such as Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez, who critique the coloniality of modernity, she demonstrates how Indigenous artists used exhibitions as sites of resistance, reasserting Indigenous sovereignty through visual and material culture. Like recent scholarship on the Global South, Horton broadens the concept of Indigenous sovereignty, framing it not only in relation to the US but also as part of a larger global movement for autonomy, dignity, and self-determination.

Chapter four explores Darryl Blackman’s painted tipi, presented at Expo 70 in Japan, as a case study of Indigenous engagements with World Fairs as both sites of spectacle and resistance. Blackman’s painted tipi, which drew upon traditional Blackfeet cosmologies, presented an alternative model of environmental stewardship and resistance to Western capitalist models. The World Fairs themselves were often showcases of technological and architectural futurism, but Blackman’s tipi served as an expression of a grounded vision of sustainability that challenged the “city of the future” narrative. By tracing the oral histories surrounding Blackman’s work, Horton uncovers the tensions between commodification and cultural continuity, revealing the challenges Indigenous artists faced in negotiating artistic production within global markets.

Chapter five centers on Oscar Howe, a Sioux modernist artist who used his art to engage with the sacred pipe and its political and spiritual significance. By revisiting the historical implications of the pipe, Howe’s art critiqued colonial treaty negotiations and the betrayal of Native nations by the US government. The sacred pipe is central to many Native communities as a symbol of diplomacy, and Howe reimagined it in his abstract art to challenge the idea that Native culture was static. USIA tours, exhibitions, and exchanges were key mechanisms through which the US projected its vision of capitalist democracy globally. Howe used the sacred pipe to reclaim Indigenous political power—demonstrating that Native people had sophisticated and ongoing systems of diplomacy that could bridge communities and resist the ideologies of settler colonialism.

In her conclusion, Horton returns to Scholder’s provocative engagement with US Cold War propaganda, particularly his Indian/Vampir series, which allegorizes Native dispossession through the figure of the vampire. Scholder’s appropriation of the vampire motif, Horton suggests, serves as a subversive commentary on the extractive nature of settler colonialism, drawing connections between Indigenous land loss and the global circuits of Cold War exploitation.

By emphasizing the agency of Indigenous artists within Cold War cultural diplomacy, Horton contributes to ongoing historiographic debates about the intersections of art, politics, and Indigenous resistance. Additionally, though, she pushes forward the study of Cold War art history. Framing Indigenous artists as diplomats, she positions Indigenous modernisms as central, rather than peripheral, to the era’s geopolitical and aesthetic stakes.