Suddenly I'm aware of many eyes on this tarot project. It's nice to know I'm not operating in a vacuum! Thanks everybody for taking the time to look at this preliminary test run and passing on your thoughts.
The Prairie Tarot comes out of my own experiences growing up in Montana. My background is in the tiny towns on wide plains, next door to Canada - wheat fields, oil derricks, cattle ranches, railroads, cactus - the proverbial Big Sky country. Gravelly, scraped by glaciers, dry, windy. Each card image is condensed out of that. My area was only settled in 1880, following the establishment of a reservation which, incidentally, borders the family farm. My great-grandfather was the first settler in the area.
The time period for this tarot is the End of the West, that space between the end of the Indian Wars and the Civil War, and the modern era - roughly 1875 to 1910. It has to do with things I saw, people I met and stories I heard.
Someone will ask why the Hierophant is a native shaman while Temperance is a white settler. Someone else will ask why Asians or Africans aren't represented. Shouldn't there be more cowboys? Where's Will Rogers, or Annie Oakley, or General Custer, or Sacajawea?
And those questions are indeed reasonable. Another person would have come up with an entirely different set of correspondences.
The simple answer is that the Prairie Tarot is a deck made only for myself, and based on my own background. It's not about history-as-a-whole, and it's not intended as any sort of end-all canonical interpretation of tarot iconography translated into symbols from the American West. I'm fully aware that I couldn't possibly satisfy everyone's sensibilities, so I concentrated on satisfying my own. I hope it can be accepted in that spirit.
] deck. I visited Montana for a wedding and loved the gorgeous landscape. The artwork is exceptional and so is the concept so I am looking forward to it!