{"id":608863,"date":"2018-07-31T07:26:08","date_gmt":"2018-07-31T13:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=608863"},"modified":"2018-07-31T16:41:34","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T22:41:34","slug":"in-wake-of-charlottesville-new-scrutiny-for-native-american-statues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/07\/in-wake-of-charlottesville-new-scrutiny-for-native-american-statues\/","title":{"rendered":"In wake of Charlottesville, new scrutiny for Native American statues"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_608874\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 771px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pioneer_Monument_(San_Francisco)#\/media\/File:2017_Pioneer_Monument_-_east_Early_Days.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-608874 size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/1024px-2017_Pioneer_Monument_-_east_Early_Days-771x587.jpg\" alt=\"Early days\" width=\"771\" height=\"587\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/1024px-2017_Pioneer_Monument_-_east_Early_Days-771x587.jpg 771w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/1024px-2017_Pioneer_Monument_-_east_Early_Days-336x256.jpg 336w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/1024px-2017_Pioneer_Monument_-_east_Early_Days-768x585.jpg 768w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/1024px-2017_Pioneer_Monument_-_east_Early_Days.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Beyond My Ken \/ Creative Commons<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">The &#8220;Early Days&#8221; sculpture that&#8217;s part of San Francisco&#8217;s Pioneer Monument includes a Native American man below a Spanish missionary and a vaquero. There are discussions underway about the possibility of removing the sculpture.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The controversy that swept Southern states over Confederate monuments is spreading across the nation, as cities contend with calls to remove statues depicting stereotyped and subjugated Native Americans.<\/p>\n<p>Among them: a sculpture in San Francisco\u2019s Pioneer Monument near City Hall that shows a Native American at the feet of a Spanish missionary and vaquero, and one in New York City that depicts a Native American and an African holding the stirrups of Theodore Roosevelt astride a horse. Earlier this year in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a granite sculpture from the city\u2019s Fountain of the Pioneers was trucked away to storage. It showed a pioneer, weapon raised, rising above a Native American.<\/p>\n<p>In all three cases, Native Americans have criticized the statues as inaccurate, demeaning and racist for decades. Red paint symbolizing blood was splashed over the Roosevelt statue as long ago as 1971, and as recently as October.<\/p>\n<p>But the deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August has prompted renewed activism from Native Americans protesting statues in their own communities. It has also shifted attitudes among some city officials, who now recognize that they have monuments akin to Confederate statues in their own backyards.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"module align-left half type-aside\">\n<h3>About this article<\/h3>\n<p>This article comes from\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.pewtrusts.org\/en\/research-and-analysis\/blogs\/stateline\/2018\/07\/27\/in-wake-of-charlottesville-new-scrutiny-for-native-american-statues\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stateline<\/a>, an initiative of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.pewtrusts.org\/en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Pew Charitable Trusts<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>\u201cIt doesn\u2019t take much to put two and two together and think, \u2018Well we\u2019ve got an issue here in La Crosse,\u2019\u201d said Democratic Mayor Tim Kabat of La Crosse, Wisconsin. City officials are meeting with members of the Ho-Chunk Nation to plan for the removal from a public park of a 25-foot painted concrete statue of a Native American dubbed \u201cHiawatha.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The events in Charlottesville prompted San Francisco\u2019s Historic Preservation and Arts commissions to vote in March to remove the Pioneer Monument statue, with support from the mayor and the city\u2019s Board of Supervisors.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe climate now is ripe for people to take it seriously,\u201d said Barbara Mumby Huerta, an arts commission member of Powhatan and Maidu descent who began advocating for the statue\u2019s removal before joining the commission. \u201cPeople evolve.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But in April, the city\u2019s Board of Appeals struck down the decision. Board member Rick Swig called removing the statue \u201csuppression of thought.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTaking [the statue] down is not going to remove history,\u201d added board member Darryl Honda. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing we don\u2019t remove a window from a house that\u2019s 50 years old but we\u2019re going to take the oldest statue out of City Hall.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Arts and Historic Preservation commissions won a rehearing of the issue by the Board of Appeals, set for the end of summer.<\/p>\n<p>Mishuana Goeman, chairwoman of the American Indian Studies department at UCLA and a member of the Tonawanda Band of Seneca, said statues like San Francisco\u2019s Pioneer Monument began cropping up in California after it became a state in 1850. Pioneer memorials were \u201ca way to\u00a0Americanize the landscape,\u201d Goeman said.\u00a0\u201cTo affirm American dominance over the landscape, and to affirm a certain historical past that wasn\u2019t quite in the past yet.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lecia Brooks, outreach director for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, which tracks white supremacist groups, said the analogy between removing Native American statues and Confederate monuments is apt.<\/p>\n<p>According to the center, communities across the country have removed 110 Confederate symbols, including 47 monuments, since June 2015, when a white supremacist killed nine African Americans in a Charleston church and sparked a national conversation about commemorations of the Confederacy. There are still 772 Confederate monuments in place.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe couldn\u2019t be more pleased that the conversation has extended to folks and communities taking a closer look at these offensive statues that depict Native Americans as submissive or stereotypical,\u201d Brooks said.<\/p>\n<h3>Adding context<\/h3>\n<p>The debate has broadened to include statues that don\u2019t depict Native Americans but celebrate their oppressors.<\/p>\n<p>In March, San Jose, California, removed a statue of Christopher Columbus, celebrated by many Italian-Americans but reviled as a slaver and murderer by Native Americans, from City Hall and sent it to the Italian American Heritage Foundation. In Arcata, California, the city council in February voted to remove a statue of President William McKinley, who presided over the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines and signed the 1898 Curtis Act, which removed 90 million acres from tribal control in what is now Oklahoma.\u00a0Arcata voters will make a final decision through a ballot measure in November.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>One approach to any public art criticized as racist has been to add plaques to provide historical context and acknowledge changing values. In New York City, a mayoral commission on monuments, formed after the Charlottesville violence, issued a report in January calling for the addition of historical markers in Columbus Circle, home to a 76-foot monument to the 15th century explorer.<\/p>\n<p>The commission also called for the removal of a Fifth Avenue statue of J. Marion Sims, a 19th century surgeon dubbed the \u201cfather of gynecology\u201d who experimented, without using anesthesia, on enslaved women. In April, it was moved to Sims\u2019 gravesite in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n<p>The mayoral commission could not reach consensus on what to do about an equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, located on the steps of New York\u2019s American Museum of Natural History. Some members viewed the Native American and African figures as allegorical representations of the continents, while others said the positioning of the statues depicted a clear racial hierarchy.<\/p>\n<p>Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio directed the city and the natural history museum to come up with signage and programming to provide additional information.\u00a0\u201cOur approach will focus on adding detail and nuance to \u2014 instead of removing entirely \u2014 the representations of these histories,\u201d de Blasio said in January when the commission released its report.<\/p>\n<p>But in San Francisco, the Pioneer Monument already has a plaque \u2014 and critics say it isn\u2019t enough.\u00a0Added in 1996, it notes that European settlement decimated the Native American population and that the sculpture portrays \u201ca conventional attitude of the 19th century.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mumby Huerta of the arts commission said statues such as the Pioneer Monument \u201cwere never intended to be educational tools.\u201d Instead, she said, \u201cthe intent was to show [white] supremacy. \u2026 If you continue to have that imagery, that is what people are going to take away.\u201d<\/p>\n<h3>Quick reversal in Kalamazoo<\/h3>\n<p>In 2016, Kalamazoo officials crafted a $2.8 million plan to restore the Fountain of the Pioneers, which depicted a Native American in headdress standing face to face with a white settler. Under the plan, developed in consultation with the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of the Pottawatomi Indians, the city would have added contextual information to the sculpture, and erected Native American monuments elsewhere in the city.<\/p>\n<p>But last Thanksgiving, the Kalamazoo statue was doused with red paint. In March, the city removed it. \u201cWe all had to recognize that the time had come to make this decision,\u201d said Jeff Chamberlain, Kalamazoo\u2019s deputy city manager.<\/p>\n<p>The violence last August in Charlottesville \u201cupped the ante and changed the conversation\u201d in La Crosse, according to Peggy Derrick, executive director of the La Crosse County Historical Society. The city\u2019s Hiawatha statue, made in 1961 by a local art teacher at the request of the chamber of commerce, was supposed to help draw tourists to the stretch of the Mississippi River that business groups in the 1940s had named the Hiawatha Valley.<\/p>\n<p>There were some calls to remove the statue in 1992, amid celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus\u2019 voyage to America, but they were unsuccessful. The current effort appears to have more momentum.<\/p>\n<p>Tracy Littlejohn, a Ho-Chunk tribal member who has been among those meeting with La Crosse city officials to discuss removing the statue, said that as a child she was happy to see Hiawatha and listen to his coin-operated voice tell a Ho-Chunk legend about the confluence of rivers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cForty years ago, I was like, \u2018Wow, I\u2019m actually seeing a Native American somewhere,\u2019\u201d she said. When she visited as an adult, her reaction was different. For one thing, the historical Hiawatha was a 16th century Onondaga chief (living among the Mohawks, according to some accounts) in what is now New York, not a Wisconsin Ho-Chunk.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo me it was an ugly site. Not necessarily artistically, but to me it just felt ugly,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not even representing us correctly, if that is what it was meant to do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>After a series of meetings with Ho-Chunk representatives and members of the artist\u2019s family, the fate of the statue is \u201cstill not totally resolved, but it seems to me that we feel like we have some strong movement to have it relocated\u201d to private property, Mayor Kabat said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cJust because something has been there doesn\u2019t mean it should be there forever,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about how we all grow and evolve and how society also changes. Today we view Native people much differently than we did in the 1950s and \u201960s. That\u2019s just reality.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The controversy that swept Southern states over Confederate monuments is spreading across the nation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":608874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[709,143],"class_list":["post-608863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-native-americans","tag-race-and-ethnicity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}