Challenging Western Myths in “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy"

Our counter-artifact, inspired by Margaret Atwood’s poem “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy” challenges the way Westerns portray cowboys as heroes while ignoring the damage they cause to the environment and culture. Atwood’s poem does something similar by describing the cowboy’s “trail of desolation,” with images like “beer bottles” and “bird skulls.” In this creative exercise, we used tweets and visuals (see pdf attachment below) to show these problems in a modern way, blending humor and critique. We represented littered landscapes to show the destruction caused by cowboys. The tweets uses hashtags…