They are inevitable in this country, often emerging in the form of white crosses to mark the aftermath of violent death or tragedy. Twenty-one such makeshift memorials appeared this week in Uvalde, Texas. (And previously in Buffalo and Boulder and Pittsburgh and Parkland and...)
Photos of the informal memorials resonated with me, because I’ve been writing lately about monuments and their connection to a legacy of violence in this country. Specifically, about how communities in the West are beginning to reconsider monuments that, in many locations, memorialize in marble and bronze what dominant American culture has portrayed as the conquering of the region by Europeans. As I wrote recently in a piece for Stateline, among them are hundreds of pioneer monuments, many of which celebrate white dominance over Indigenous people as the nation expanded west.
I've been considering monuments much of my whole thinking life, at least since I was a child and the schoolchildren of Oregon were asked to donate their pennies so that the ax-wielding pioneer statue atop the state capitol could be refurbished with $40,000 in new gold leaf.* We were asked as children to turn over the contents of our piggy banks to literally buy into the myth of rugged pioneer individualism! But only after the adults in the state legislature declined to pay for it.
Still seething decades later, I did too much research and too many interviews for the piece about pioneer monuments. As a result, a bunch of stuff ended up on the cutting room floor. I thought I'd share some of the material that didn't make it into the final story. It seems appropriate to do so today, the day where we as Americans gather at monuments to honor those who died fighting for this country.
One of the things I wondered is why humans are compelled to construct monuments. I talked to the sculptor and art professor Jess Perlitz, who teaches a class on monuments and memorials at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. Monuments are a way of telling history and passing things along or mourning or marking tragic, difficult events, she said.
"We as relational beings living in a culture, in a city, want to mark things," she said.
She also told me that she emphasizes to students the importance of paying attention to how memorials often are reminders of who has power, rendered in physical form. Marking certain stories may be about fear of losing power, or the fear of a story "not being told the way they want it to be told," she said.
"I always want people to be rethinking what the monument/memorial is, but also recognizing that we also kind of need them and want them," she said.
Even before I turned the story in to my editors, I realized it wasn't necessary to explain why we need a physical gathering place to remember our triumphs or what we lost – it's as obvious as the ancient pyramids or the modern ghost bikes on city streets. And yes, the white crosses in Uvalde. We've always done it; we will probably always do it, as long as there is human civilization. It's how we memorialize people and their stories, how we remember where and what we came from, how we signify what we as organized societies consider to be important. Perhaps it’s also one way of insisting that what we did with our time on earth matters.
It's also why people instinctively tore down so many monuments in 2020 as we confronted the racism and fear at the heart of American policing. Our history, atop our capitols and in our town squares, shows that we have always chosen massacre as some sort of twisted tradeoff depicted as freedom.
But freedom for who? Until we confront and stop glorifying the violence that built this nation and its continued manifestation in our gun laws, nothing will happen. Nothing. We will continue seeing makeshift memorials to mass murder.
And yet, violence does not have to be an inevitable condition of American life. I know all the effort may seem futile and exhausting right now, given the political reality. But while reporting this story about monuments, there were ample examples of communities working to honor non-dominant narratives and to heal after collective trauma.
One of my favorite examples I learned about in my reporting is the Rapid City Indian Boarding School Lands Project in South Dakota. The project is developing an interpretive site and memorial to the children who died at the Rapid City Indian Boarding School, a federal school that operated from 1898 to 1933. Amy Sazue, the monument's executive director, told me that they envision it as a contemplative place in direct contrast to the massive busts of former presidents 25 miles away at Mount Rushmore.
"Those families of those kids are still here," Sazue said. "We want it to be a place where they can come and remember their family, remember their ancestors...and acknowledge that they did exist and that their lives meant something. And we also are really intentional in not so much telling the story of the school, but the story of the lives of the students, the children that lived and died there. That's the untold narrative."
The South Dakota site is among a slate of new monuments to untold narratives that got support from Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based arts nonprofit with substantial financial backing from the Mellon Foundation. The existing monument landscape in the United States does not tell a full history of this country, said Paul Farber, Monument Lab's executive director.
"We're in this moment of kind of a simultaneous renaissance of public art and repression of a full history, across this country," Farber said, referring in part to discussions about critical race theory and bans in some states on what teachers are allowed to teach. "There's a reason why this all plays out in our public squares, because these are lighting rods for public debate. So I think that the more that we understand that change is not waiting to happen, it is happening and when we recognize that and resource that and pay attention to it, we will learn from it in the process."
Something else that did not make it into my most recent story was about the city of Denver and the status of their pioneer monuments. Denver took down monuments to Kit Carson and Christopher Columbus in 2020. It took them two weeks to get back to me, but I think their response is important: Officials there emailed me after the story ran to say that the city is evaluating its public art collection "to identify any works that could be considered problematic with regards to historical injustices." They also created a Renaming Commission to research and consider city assets (such as parks and buildings) for renaming, reframing or leaving them as is.
I've written before about systems thinking and how there are multiple leverage points for any problem, as well as how envisioning new paradigms or worldviews is by far the most powerful and lasting path to change. (And the most difficult.) When it comes to gun violence, I'm convinced that one additional leverage point is to reconsider the stories we tell about ourselves and our history. One place to begin is with monuments and names. We can reframe our worldview by reconsidering what and how we name places, or who or what we choose to memorialize.
For example, for any of you who live in Albuquerque or who know someone who does, I came across this during my reporting: The city is looking for people to serve on its Arts Board to help determine what new public art should exist. Most towns need such volunteers. Many of you may be looking for a place to devote your time, resources and attention. I believe this with all my heart: It is possible to craft a worldview that rejects the violence of our past. It could start in your town square, with the names and statues where you live.
A final example: When I got the annual call this spring requesting a donation to my undergraduate alma mater, the student representative told me about life on campus in the second year of Covid. I urged her to take an inner tube float on the Maury River before her graduation, a rite of passage at the school. But I also told her I would no longer give money to the university, because I do not think the school's board of trustees made the right decision last year about the name of the college. I was not the only one with that message, the student told me, and she said they were compiling such responses from alumni.
Maybe my meager donation doesn't matter. But maybe it does, especially if enough of us weigh in when we get calls asking for money. Regardless, the adults no longer get to raid my piggy bank to gild over the legacy of white supremacy.
With lots of love to those mourning today,
Erika
* The newspaper in the state capital, the Statesman-Journal, wrote a tongue-in-cheek editorial in 2015 calling for the Oregon pioneer statue to be torn down to be scrapped for money to pay for infrastructure. It did not address the statue as a representation of the state-sanctioned violence at the heart of Oregon's settler past. I'm not calling for it to be removed, not at all. But we need to rethink what symbols we glorify in eight and a half tons of bronze, and why.
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For more on monuments, please consider this piece by Brian Libby, an architecture writer here in Portland. I interviewed him for my Stateline piece, but didn’t have room to include his smart thoughts on monuments.
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