3/11/2023 0 Comments Racist space pioneer little europe![]() The photos will be part of the San Francisco Art Commission’s American Indian Initiative.Įach pioneer monument has its own history and local meaning. In April 2019, about 150 Native American leaders and youth from across California posed for photographs on the empty base where “Early Days” once stood. On September 14, 2018, the “Early Days” statue was removed from the San Francisco monument and placed in storage. The San Francisco Arts Commission agrees, but the Board of Appeals blocked its removal in April. They want “Early Days” – if not the entire monument – taken down. But today’s protesters argued that plaque, hidden by landscaping, is not enough. In the 1990s, activists persuaded the city to place a plaque telling the dark side of California history in front of the statue. ![]() In April, Kalamazoo, Michigan removed its 1940 “Fountain of the Pioneers” because local residents disliked its depiction of a white settler looming over an American Indian.Īfter decades of protest, San Francisco debated taking down the depiction of a Spanish missionary towering over an American Indian from the 1894 pioneer monument. The recent debate about Confederate monuments has sparked some discussion of pioneer monuments in a few places. Like earlier monuments, they reinforce white dominance and erase ethnic diversity in the American West. As their titles suggest, these statues honor pioneer families’ grit, and they teach local history.īut these statues still represent a racist view, ignoring the cost of white settlement on Native lands. More recent monuments, such as Goodland, Kansas’s “ They Came to Stay” and Omaha, Nebraska’s “ Pioneer Courage,” do not directly engage racial politics. ![]() And they offered a conservative model of womanhood to contrast flappers wearing short dresses and bobbed hair and women’s growing sexual freedom. Pioneer mothers in sunbonnets stood for white “civilization” winning in the West. New pioneer monuments from Maryland to California focused on western women. MacMonnies’s model included a mounted Plains American Indian warrior atop the pillar to show American Indians yielding to white settlement.īut Denver residents expected the figure at the top of the pillar to represent the pinnacle of progress, like “Eureka,” the female figure representing the spirit of California on San Francisco’s monument.ĭenver’s residents argued that the monument needed a white man on top, so MacMonnies revised his design, replacing the American Indian warrior with frontiersman and American Indian fighter Kit Carson, on horseback.Īugust Leimbach, Madonna of the Trail, Springfield, Ohio, 1928.īy the 1920s, whites controlled most western lands, and they stopped depicting American Indians in their pioneer monuments. MacMonnies proposed a large stone pillar surrounded by bronze hunters, miners and settlers similar to San Francisco’s celebrated monument. For example, Denver residents in 1907 vocally opposed prominent American sculptor Frederick MacMonnies’s plan for a pioneer monument. They explicitly celebrated the dominant white view of the Wild West progressing from American Indian “savagery” to white “civilization.”ĭeviations from that script produced public controversy. Those statues showed white men claiming land and building farms and cities in the West. They date from the 1890s and early 1900s, as whites settled the frontier and pushed American Indians onto reservations. The earliest pioneer monuments were put up in midwestern and western cities such as Des Moines, Iowa and San Francisco, California. Activists tore down a Confederate soldier statue in Durham, North Carolina last year.īy contrast, there has been far less attention on the roughly 200 pioneer monuments erected for similar reasons around the same time. In the past few years, cities such as New Orleans, Louisiana and Baltimore, Maryland have chosen to remove their Confederate statues. In fact, the Civil War was primarily fought to defend slavery. ![]() The “Lost Cause” is the idea that that the Civil War began as a heroic defense against northern aggression. ![]() But most statues of Confederate leaders and foot soldiers were put up around 1900 by heritage organizations to honor the “Lost Cause.” Since at least 2015, cities across the United States have debated what to do with more than 700 Confederate monuments.Īfter the Civil War, grieving widows raised funds to place monuments to soldiers in southern cemeteries. As my research and forthcoming book on pioneer monuments since the 1890s show, most early pioneer statues celebrated whites dominating American Indians. ![]()
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