Six on History: Native Americans
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"The Lenape gradually grew familiar with purchase agreements, and deft at playing buyers off one another in order to gain a better price. Many managed to sell off their lands at a time of their liking, before moving, inland or upriver, to let the white people do what they wished. After New Amsterdam became New York, in 1664, and especially after the signing of the 1758 Treaty of Easton, which aimed to push all the area’s Indians west of the Alleghenies, holdouts grew rare; the Ramapo band of Lenape, whose descendants still live in the New Jersey mountains that share their name—Ramapo means “under the rock”—were more exception than rule. Waves of colonists arrived with sheeps, pigs, and the pathogens they’d acquired from living with both. The sheer force of numbers and germs succeeded in pushing all but a few Lenape (along with the Esopus and Wappingers and Mahicans, tribes in the Hudson Valley) from their ancestral homes. But, before they left, several of their words came to grace the old colony’s hinterlands, which now include the bedroom communities served by the Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.
Some of those names belonged to sachems who left their mark on colonial deeds (Katonah, Kensico). Others use Munsee words whose origins as place-names remain obscure. (Armonk means “place of dogs”; Ho-Ho-Kus could mean “little bottle gourd.”) In the eighteen-nineties, denizens of the Tuxedo Park Club, in the tony town of Tuxedo Park, in Orange County, cut the tails off their English-style dinner jackets to create the dark suits still worn by promgoers today. But, centuries earlier, the Munsee word ptukwsiituw (or “round foot”) referred to members of their Wolf Clan, who lived in the area. Ossining, in Westchester County, may now recall John Cheever’s fictions or Sing Sing prison; once, it was a Munsee word for “stony place.” On Long Island, several town names are borrowed from local bands of Lenape (Massapequa, Matinecock) or the Pequot-speaking peoples, farther east (Manhasset, Montaukett). One Algonquian-speaking tribe, the Shinnecock, won federal recognition in 2010. Now they’ve got their own piece of the Hamptons, and a permanent reservation there, to live on or monetize as they wish.
In the old Lenape homeland by the Hudson, near the marshes-and-malls landscape of what’s now the Meadowlands, not a few Native place-words were also bands of people: Passaic (“river flowing through a valley”); Hackensack (from the Unamie achkincheschakey, or “stream that discharges itself into another on the level ground”); Raritan (“point in a tidal river”). The home zone of the Raritans, in the early sixteen-hundreds, included a large island whose cultural ties joined it more closely, then as now, to New Jersey than to New York. Staten Island’s last unbought parcel was sold, in 1670, by a Raritan sachem named Pierwim. The Raritan name for the island—Aquehonga Manacknong, or “place of the bad woods”—didn’t stick. “Raritan” itself fared better: It still names New Jersey’s longest river, and also the bay that it drains into. ... "
SOUTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. – "Just a few yards off Ministerial Road here, as cars rush by in fading afternoon light, there are stands of scrub pine, some towering oaks — and scant evidence of big dreams hidden here deep in the thick woods.
But Loren Spears can see it. It’s part of her life’s work.
It’s part of her proud heritage. For a long time, it may have seemed like a vaporous mirage. But it’s about to come true.
“Yes, I can see it,” Spears tells me at the dawn of springtime’s season of renewal. “I can envision a long driveway that swoops around and you can drop people at the door. The buses will park over there.
Yes, the first peoples of Rhode Island.
The native Americans who lived here in pre-colonial days.
The people whose lives and legacy will be showcased and preserved in the new home of the Tomaquag Museum on 18 acres of land here owned by the University of Rhode Island.
It’s really happening.
Designers are at work. Landscaping is being envisioned. A capital campaign to raise $4 million will begin in the fall. Groundbreaking is set for next year, with an opening planned in 2023.
“Practically everybody we mentioned it to said, ‘Wow! What a great idea,’ ” URI President David Dooley told me. “We think it’s another step that’s important for URI to recognize its history and heritage and its connection to the land that originally was the Narragansetts’ land.”
“You can see the culture and the history and the accomplishments – the pride of native peoples who were here,’' Dooley said. “You might even get an accurate story of the first Thanksgiving.’'
Yes, all of that will be on display at the sparkling new Tomaquag Museum which will be the latest and shiny incarnation of a museum that opened more than 60 years ago dedicated to promoting indigenous history, culture, and arts.
The new building itself will pay homage to the history it will enshrine. Windows will capture the natural energy of the sun. Walls will be thicker than usual. There will be solar panels on the roof.
“The whole idea is to fit in with the environment and to do something that is respectful to the environment,” said Laura Briggs, whose firm – BriggsKnowles Architecture + Design – is assisting the project’s design team.
That kind of careful construction will be mirrored by the exhibits inside, exhibits that will be true to the Native American story of New England, the story that Loren Spears, a citizen of the Narragansett Nation, grew up with – the story that she is now focused on preserving.
It hasn’t always been the stuff of Hallmark cards and gauzy made-for-TV movies.
“There was no way not to feel the tension,” Spears said. “You were not accepted because you didn’t fit in. You didn’t have a side to be on because I wasn’t white and I wasn’t black either. So I didn’t really fit. I was the ‘other.’ ”
She returned to Rhode Island, graduating with a degree in elementary education from URI in 1989. And never forgot the teachers – or the mentors – who helped her along the way. And she never forgot her ancestral history.
Or the time she cut her hair, then down to her waist, invoking a stern rebuke from a tribal elder.
“That stuck with me,” she recalled. “The importance of your hair as a symbol of your culture and your identity. People talk about it being part of your life’s blood and the strands of your life woven together. It doesn’t mean you’re not rebellious as a teenager and cut your hair. Because I did on a couple of occasions.”
But that rebellious teenager grew to become a keeper of her tribe’s heritage, a protector of its traditions, and now as a driving force for a new home dedicated to the preservation of a storied history.
And to setting the record straight.
“The American myth,” Loren Spears said. “The only time native people are mentioned is when it’s Thanksgiving. The only time – if we’re mentioned at all – is during the westward expansion. We’re one paragraph. And then we’re gone.
“I’ll say it again: There is no US history without indigenous people’s history. There’s no Rhode Island history or any other state’s history without the first people on the land. We don’t teach it inclusively like that.”
"Gerard Baker began his illustrious career with the National Park Service at 20. As a young patrol ranger in the 1970s, he often overheard the park interpreters while he collected trash or mowed lawns. "One thing I noticed," the Mandan/Hidatsa man from the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota told me, "is that we were never talked about. From the early, early days of the philosophies on American Indians, we were looked at as being nothing but so-called animals without even a soul. The animal that they move out of the way so they can have the land. And so, when they start making national parks, they didn't think about taking Indian land. They didn't think about that we had spiritual places. They didn't talk about that." When Baker started out in the Park Service, the park interpreters were mostly white, and the stories they told reflected white viewpoints—and blind spots.
The first European Americans to venture into the North American continent understood that they were entering someone else's homeland, that these places were fully inhabited and known. They knew that they were invaders, partly because they fought to dispossess Native Americans. But that reality got buried, and while we generally like to think that it's those other people over there who did the bad stuff, it was lovers of the beauty of the American landscape who reimagined the whole continent before 1492 as an empty place where, as the Wilderness Act of 1964 puts it, "the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
Once the US military and armed white settlers drove Native Americans from their lands, national parks from Yosemite to Yellowstone worked to keep them out so they could offer non-Native visitors a vision of nature as a place apart from humanity, a place without a history, a place where human beings were only visitors. It was a kind of representational genocide, excluding Native Americans from their homelands and erasing them from consciousness and conversation. It wasn't only national parks that did it. Nature writers and photographers and environmentalists and environmental groups also did it. The Sierra Club is not exempt. In fact, if this idea of virgin wilderness and of nature as a place apart from human culture has a beginning, that beginning is inseparable from the history of the Sierra Club and its most famous founder.
The word garden occurs over and over in the young John Muir's rapturous account of his summer in the Sierra Nevada in 1869. "More beautiful, better kept gardens cannot be imagined," he declared. When he saw Yosemite Valley from the north rim, he noted, "the level bottom seemed to be dressed like a garden." He assumed he knew who was the gardener in the valley and the heights, the meadows and the groves: "So trim and tasteful are these silvery, spiry groves one would fancy they must have been placed in position by some master landscape gardener. . . . But Nature is the only gardener able to do work so fine." ... "
Tewanima coped with such cultural eradication by tapping into an ancient Hopi tradition—running. And he would become an inspirational figure: a two-time Olympian, a record-holder for more than half a century and a source of pride for his people.
In pursuit of that question, I return to January 26, 1907, when Tewanima, about 18 years old, was enrolled at Carlisle. Officials cut his thick long hair, burned his clothes and gave him a U.S. military uniform. An Army sergeant gave him a new name, which the school spelled alternately as Lewis or Louis. Forbidden to speak his language or to practice his religion, Tewanima was led into Carlisle’s barracks to meet the school’s 1,000 students from dozens of other tribes. Since they spoke different native languages, they couldn’t communicate with one another. Most kids didn’t understand the white adults who spoke English. As a result, many youngsters couldn’t follow directions; school officials punished the children with no supper, extra work or a whipping.
Tewanima’s new life was ruled by the bell, the belt and the bugle. His days were spent learning English, sewing shirts and, in winter, shoveling snow. “He was so homesick, it traumatized him,” says his nephew Ben Nuvamsa. Early on, Tewanima and two other Hopis ran away by hopping a train. They met some hobos, who taught them how to jump on and off a moving boxcar without getting hurt. After several days, the trio landed in Amarillo, Texas, where they thought they were beyond the school’s reach. They walked boldly in the street, and a man approached and offered to buy them a meal. They accepted. But the stranger turned out to be a sheriff, and the boys were jailed, Lomayestewa says. Tewanima was only 500 miles from home, but he found himself on the next train to Carlisle.
What followed was likely a punishment of hard labor and time in the school jail cell. By April, Tewanima was back in the dorm, trying to ease his heartache by running. “If you were a Hopi male, you were expected to be a runner,” Nuvamsa says. In his boyhood, living 5,700 feet above sea level, Tewanima and his friends had spent hot summer days running 65 miles to Winslow, Arizona, just to watch the trains. After the caboose rumbled past, they would run home.
Running is also a Hopi spiritual practice. In some ceremonies, young men run to far-off places in the desert to find springs. They fill their gourds with water and run home, where the water is blessed by elders and poured on the fields, symbolizing well-being for not just the Hopi but all mankind.
At Carlisle, students ran for glory. Tewanima, in broken English, asked the track coach and legendary football instructor Glenn “Pop” Warner if he could join the track team. Warner eyed the scrawny kid and said he wasn’t an athlete, but according to family lore, Tewanima insisted: “Me run fast good. All Hopi run fast good.” After clocking his time, Warner saw that Tewanima was indeed fast—and had an astonishing “kick” finish. The Indian quickly made his mark, particularly in distance events, competing against—and beating—better-heeled runners from Lafayette College and other schools.
A year later, Tewanima was picked over many veteran runners to represent the United States in the 1908 Summer Olympic Games in London. One of Tewanima’s teammates told the London papers how he could run faster “than a streak of greased lightning.” The British press clamored to see for themselves.
Race day for the Olympic marathon, July 24, 1908, was hot—78 degrees—and humid. Tewanima joined 54 other marathoners at the starting line near Windsor Castle. For the first mile, Tewanima ran in the back of the pack, writes Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, professor and head of American Indian studies at the University of Arizona. Many men dropped out of the race from heat and exhaustion. By Mile 12, Tewanima was in the middle of the pack, accompanied by a U.S. trainer on a bicycle. But by Mile 21, the Hopi began suffering from sore feet and confusion about what his English-speaking trainer was saying. Tewanima entered the new Olympic stadium in Shepherd’s Bush to a roar of cheers. He finished in ninth place. He had “endured more agony than anyone and ran gamest,” one of his teammates recalled.
Tewanima thought that he would be allowed to go home to Arizona. Instead, he was returned to Carlisle, where he baled hay and posed in promotional pieces for the school. “Savage Hopi Indians Are Transformed Into Model Students,” one newspaper headline said above his picture.
Tewanima continued racing. In 1909, at the Pastime Athletic Club’s games at Madison Square Garden, he stunned the sports world with a sprint-finish win in the ten-mile indoor run. A month later, he won a 20-mile race in New Orleans. In May 1911, Tewanima won New York City’s 12-mile modified marathon. Fans called him the “Speedy Red Man.”
In 1912, Tewanima and another Carlisle student, Jim Thorpe, competed in the Summer Olympics in Stockholm. Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon events. Still seasick from the trans-Atlantic trip, Tewanima ran the 10,000-meter event in a blazing time of 32:06.6, though he lost to Hannes Kölehmainen of Finland. Still, Tewanima collected the silver medal and set an American record for the event—a combination that would not recur for 52 years, when Billy Mills, an Oglala Lakota Sioux, broke it in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.
At Stockholm, Tewanima “gave a remarkable exhibition of grit and persistency,” marveled James E. Sullivan, secretary of the American Olympic Committee. “After Stockholm, Tewanima became a celebrity,” says Gilbert. Yet photographs of the champion that day depict an unsmiling man of about 24. Would he finally be allowed to go home now?
First, he and Thorpe had to return to school. “They were given a fantastic reception by the citizens of Carlisle, with a parade and fireworks,” Nuvamsa says. Dignitaries such as the school superintendent and Pop Warner gave speeches praising the two athletes. Thorpe addressed the crowd, saying he was grateful for the “splendid time.” Then Tewanima stood up. “Me too,” he said, and sat down. To him, the accolades rang hollow, says Lomayestewa.
Finally, after almost six years in virtual captivity, he was allowed to leave Carlisle. In September 1912, he walked into his village on Second Mesa and was soon tending cornfields, herding sheep and participating in traditional ceremonies. Tewanima married a Hopi woman named Blanche, and they had a baby, Rose, their only child. But Rose, like her father, was sent to an Indian boarding school. She eventually became ill and returned home sometime in the 1920s, where she died from an undiagnosed illness.
Tewanima never again competed in a race, running only for his religion. He refused to speak English, didn’t give many interviews despite being sought out, and became chief of one of his clan’s holy organizations, the Antelope Society. In 1954, at age 66, Tewanima returned to New York, and the Helms Athletic Foundation honored him as a member of the All-Time U.S. Track and Field Team. Three years later, he was inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame. Soon, though, the great runner was forgotten by mainstream sports historians and writers. He wasn’t a multisport all-star like Jim Thorpe. And his civic work in Hopi Nation did not make national headlines.
In his final years, Tewanima played a key role in sacred ceremonies. On January 18, 1969, he was preparing for one such event with his nephew Lomayestewa, then just 10 years old. The boy was supposed to walk his 81-year-old uncle home, but instead grew sleepy and left early. So Tewanima walked home alone in the moonless night. As best as anyone can tell, he saw lights in the distance and, believing they were from his village, headed toward them. But he miscalculated, stepped off a cliff, and plunged 70 feet to his death. All night his clan searched for him. They found his body at daybreak.
Today, more than a century after Tewanima’s unlikely Olympian feats, the Hopi hold the annual Louis Tewanima Footrace in his honor, which is open to runners from all states and nations. Since 1974, hundreds of adults and children have gathered to run the ancient trails of Hopiland. In 2020, because of Covid-19, the races went virtual; runners used the honor system to report their times.
“The thing I learned from him was, ‘Be Hopi,’” says Nuvamsa. “He was never colonized.”
Editor's Note, May 20, 2021: An earlier version of this story said that Billy Mills was the first to break Tewanima's record in the 10,000-meter event. He was the first to both break the record and earn an Olympic medal at the same time."
"When I first met Carol Dana, in the spring of 2018, she told me that she was thinking of getting a parrot. Dana, a member of the Penobscot Nation, one of five hundred and seventy-four Native American tribes recognized by the United States federal government, was attending a small ceremony at the University of Maine’s anthropology museum. She wore her silver hair pulled back from her face, and introduced herself to me as the tribe’s language master, a title, she added, that she wasn’t fully comfortable with. The idea of mastery seemed an imprecise way to describe the fraught relationship she had with the Penobscot words inside her head. Though not fluent, Dana has a better grasp of the language than anyone else on Indian Island, where six hundred of the world’s estimated twenty-four hundred members of the Penobscot tribe live. She admitted to being linguistically lonely. “I’ve been talking to myself in Penobscot for years,” she said. “You need to say it out loud, so your own ears can hear it.” Though she knew that a bird wouldn’t be able to carry on a conversation, she thought that simply hearing Penobscot words spoken at home by another living creature would be better than nothing.
Dana, who is sixty-eight, learned most of what she knows of Penobscot not from her tribal elders but from Frank Siebert, a self-taught linguist who hired her, in 1982, as a research assistant. He was seventy; Dana was thirty. Siebert had grown up in Philadelphia and had been passionate about Native Americans for as long as he could remember—as a child, he had slept with a toy tomahawk in his bed. He, Dana, and a few other assistants worked in a bare office on Indian Island, a mile-wide shallot-shaped island in the middle of the Penobscot River. Dana, who was brought up there, had as a child been forbidden to go to the mainland, and she’d spent her school-age days picking blueberries and mayflowers, building lean-tos, and impaling apples on sticks, throwing them like javelins. In the summer, she and her friends swam in the river; in the fall, they wrestled in the leaves. Siebert, who had moved to Maine permanently about fifteen years before Dana joined him in his work, had no such memories, but together they muttered and scribbled in a language that only a handful of people still spoke.
I first heard about Frank Siebert a year before I met Dana, from Jane Anderson, a legal scholar at N.Y.U. I was interested in the ways in which indigenous knowledge, passed down through many generations and often collectively held, is considered essentially authorless by Western intellectual-property law. Anderson, who is Australian, works with indigenous communities around the world to help solve conflicts over the ownership of ancient ideas. I had come to her with questions about a burgeoning movement in Guatemala to trademark traditional weaving designs, but within an hour I was convinced that I should travel not to Central America but to Maine, which, she told me, was home to a sovereign nation whose language was technically owned by a dead white man who had devised a way to write it down.
The name Penobscot is a mangled rendering of punawuhpskek—or pαnáwαhpskek, in the writing system Siebert introduced—meaning “the place where the rocks clear out.” For more than three hundred generations, the tribe, which once had fifty thousand members, hunted on the banks of the Penobscot River, navigated its waters, and spoke one of the many Eastern Algonquian languages heard along a swath of the northern Atlantic coast—an area that today extends from Nova Scotia to North Carolina. Siebert began studying the Penobscot language in the nineteen-thirties, four hundred years after European explorers arrived. By then, all that was left of the Penobscot territory, which once encompassed half of Maine, was a reservation that included Indian Island, which can be circumnavigated by foot in less than an hour, and some smaller islands along the river. The tribe’s language had nearly disappeared from use. Beginning in the eighteen-eighties, Penobscot children were sent to government-sponsored residential schools, where teachers beat them for speaking anything but English. “Anywhere else in the world, you’re thought to be more intelligent if you’re bilingual—except for us, for some reason,” Dana told me. The strategy, replicated across the country, was effective: more than three hundred indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States; today, linguists worry that within thirty years there will be only twenty. By the middle of the twentieth century, there were just two dozen Penobscot speakers on Indian Island, most of them elderly. When they tried to teach Penobscot to younger members of the tribe, their efforts were met with complaints that there was no use for it anyway.
But Dana loved listening to her grandmother speak the language of her ancestors. Like other indigenous New England dialects, Penobscot does not distinguish between certain commonly used consonants—“B”s and “P”s, for instance, or “Z”s and “S”s. The sonic effect of Penobscot—melodic, gentle, and worn-sounding, almost like singing—is at odds with the language’s structure, which is especially visual, efficient, and kinetic. Single words can express full ideas. Canoe is “that which flows lightly upon the water”; an otter is a “wandering portager”; lunch is “noon eat”; butter is “milk grease”; flower is “something bursting forth into the light.” Dana describes Penobscot words as “little poetic pictures.” Her grandmother was a stoic and remote woman when she spoke in English, but she seemed transformed when laughing and joking and talking with her Native friends. “That’s how language is conveyed,” Dana said. “Around the kitchen table.” ...
"After last summer’s reckonings around racism, many U.S. cities are reexamining their public memorial landscapes. For example, a Chicago monuments commission is now in its fourth month of soliciting public comments on 41 monuments throughout the city that have been flagged as controversial.
Among the statues under review are the Bowman and the Spearman sculptures on Michigan Avenue in Chicago’s downtown. The sculptures, created in 1928 by the celebrated Croatian artist Ivan Mestrovic, are impossible to miss. Two 17-foot-tall anonymous figures in romantic Plains Indian headdresses sit atop horses guarding the entrance to Grant Park, where thousands of city residents stroll each week. These statues rank among the most prominent representations of Native Americans in Chicago.
Chicago Indigenous history experts, art historians and Croatian heritage leaders have met to discuss the Bowman and the Spearman, with some defenders of the sculptures pleading that the pieces are objects of Croatian pride rather than an attempt to harm Native American people. But, as this debate unfolds, it is clear that the problem is about more than one artist, one immigrant group and one monument. What is at stake in the debate is how Indigenous history is understood in American society more broadly.
Many students are surprised to learn that Chicago — or Zhegagoynak in the Potawatomi language — has an Indigenous history, not to mention present. Today, 71 percent of Native American people are urban, not rural, and Chicago is home to one of the largest urban populations of Native Americans in the United States with over 65,000 residents.
Over 13 unique Indigenous nations resided there before French settlers arrived in the 1600s, and many other Indigenous nations across the Upper Midwest have ties to the area because Chicago sat at the confluence of several important waterways. It was for this reason that American settlers became so attached to the space at the turn of the 18th century, with their settlements facilitated by the government’s violent expulsion of Indigenous people from the region. As American developers began to transport grain, timber and other resources from farms across the Midwest into the international economy by way of Chicago, the Blackhawk War of 1832 and the Potawatomi Trail of Death in 1838 resulted in the death and removal at gunpoint of thousands of Indigenous Midwesterners to Kansas and Oklahoma.
As these groups attempted to rebuild their governments and communities in lands foreign to them, they became targets of predatory land policies that resulted in the theft of yet more territory. In the 1880s, Indigenous children from both these removed tribes and from groups that had remained in the Midwest were taken away to Indian boarding schools across the country. Forbidden to practice their religion or see their parents, missionaries washed their mouths with soap when they spoke their native languages — an effort that aimed to eradicate Indigenous people and practices from the country.
A half-century later, in the 1950s and 1960s, Chicago became one of the biggest sites of the urban relocation of Native American people in yet another government attempt to “civilize” them through urbanization. Native Americans are thus at the heart of a winding and complicated history of violence and survival that is built into Chicago’s core.
The lack of knowledge of this history stems from inaccurate representations and outright erasure of Native Americans at every level of our society.
Mestrovic’s statues are part of this destructive legacy.
While Americans displaced Indigenous people from their land, they also appropriated their images and culture. In particular, after the closure of the frontier in the 1870s, Indigenous imagery helped Americans solve an identity crisis. Historically, war against Indigenous people had helped unify the hundreds of different ethnic and religious groups who settled North America. But with no Indian wars to wage anymore after the removal of Indigenous people across the West to reservations, Americans found that representations of Indigenous people could do some of that work of forging an American identity.
Images of Native Americans became about representing America’s vision of itself as a nation distinct from the European countries from which many of its White settlers hailed. Europe had great art and classical ties, while America had its “virgin” landscape and its “Indians” — who were portrayed as frozen in a distant past. Situating Indigenous people in the past was an important conceptual step for new Americans to make in the process of conquest. If they were never meant for the modern world, then it was easier to justify removing them from their lands to allow for the settlement of European immigrants in North America.
Romanticized statues of Native Americans proliferated in the early 20th century, often portraying figures as “noble savages” in Plains Indian headdresses. This was traditional dress that warriors from Oceti Sakowin, Apsáalooke and other communities across the Great Plains wore to prepare themselves for life-or-death battles against the U.S. Army to resist removal. First looted by plundering armies and put on display in art museums across the country for White audiences, this stolen traditional dress then became an inaccurate symbol that flattened and conflated diverse Native American nations, from the expert fisherman of the Pacific Northwest to the Pueblo dwellers of the Southwest.
Mestrovic was a celebrated sculptor whose work was a bright artistic celebration of Art Deco and Art Nouveau forms and Croatian heritage. But by all accounts, he had never met a Native American when the Art Institute of Chicago asked him to create the Bowman and the Spearman. And while Croatian Americans in Chicago may see the Bowman and the Spearman as part of their cultural patrimony, it comes at the cost of perpetuating harms against Indigenous Americans.
Art like Mestrovic’s that cast Indigenous people as belonging only to the distant past helps erase the brutal history of conquest and violence that continues to reverberate in those communities today. Pressing political concerns around missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, environmental sovereignty and land protection become that much easier to dismiss.
Statues are about representation and representation is about power. As the great Indigenous intellectual Vine Deloria once wrote, “Before the white man can learn to relate to others he must forgo the pleasure of defining them.” These are the stakes of the Chicago commission’s work. Visibly racist and inaccurate representations of Indigenous people in public spaces send a message to Indigenous people everywhere that they are not in control of their own destiny, that they are not permitted to define themselves. The process of conquest continues."
