City facing its own battle on disputed monuments
800-ton Pioneer statue depicts fallen Indian, missionary above him
San Francisco is never one to stay out of a national, hot-button political squabble, and the controversy over the removal of Confederate statues throughout the South made its way here over the weekend.
That’s when an old debate became new again thanks to a Facebook group calling for the removal of the Pioneer Monument. It’s that 800ton sculpture depicting the settlement of California that sits between the Main Library and the Asian Art Museum in the Civic Center.
Frankly, I’d never paid much attention to it. Even with its gargantuan size, it’s not the most eye-catching part of that stretch of Fulton Street, which sees a daily mix of tourist buses, open-air heroin use, homeless people and business types rushing from BART to the office.
But it’s easy to see where the anti-Pioneer Monument folks are coming from. And Supervisor Jane Kim, whose district includes the monument, is on their side.
“I support the removal and will be supporting the community process already under way,” Kim said in a statement.
The busy, intricate structure is topped by a large statue of the goddess of wisdom and war, but the controversial part is lower down and on the eastern end of the monument.
“I don’t know why it’s been allowed to be in this so-called liberal and woke city.” Jennifer Cleary, voice teacher, on San Francisco’s Pioneer Monument
That section is called “Early Days” and depicts a nearly naked American Indian man on the ground with a Spanish vaquero standing over him and raising his hand in victory. A missionary also towers over the fallen man, one hand reaching down to him and the other pointing to heaven.
Is it merely a depiction of the past — a brutal past, but our state’s history nonetheless? Or is it a slap in the face to American Indians because it seemingly celebrates their conquest? In any case, it surely belies our right to scoff at Southern states for only now dealing with the statues that glorify their dark past.
About a dozen people, spurred by the Facebook group, gathered at Monday’s Arts Commission meeting to implore it to remove the monument.
Iesha Killip, who said she is a full-blooded American Indian, said it’s “crazy” the monument stands in such a prominent place in modern-day San Francisco.
“Why is the Indian on the ground? We’re warriors. We stand,” said Killip, a 25-year-old retail manager who lives in the Haight. “It shows pure hatred to my people.”
Jennifer Cleary, a 39-year-old voice teacher who lives in the Mission, said she’s tired of San Francisco’s holier-than-thou attitude when it comes to race.
“I don’t know why it’s been allowed to be in this so-called liberal and woke city for as long as it’s been here,” she said. “We need to clean up our own backyard — yesterday.”
The Arts Commission itself didn’t discuss the matter Monday because it wasn’t on the agenda but said it will discuss it at its Oct. 2 meeting.
Any decision about removing all or part of the Pioneer Monument would happen only after a lengthy process involving an evaluation of its historic and artistic merits and extensive research about how much it would cost to dismantle.
By the way, the Pioneer Monument isn’t the only one earning scrutiny these days. A statue of Father Junipero Serra, who founded California’s missions, that sits in Golden Gate Park was recently partially wrapped in a white sheet reading, “Take Down White Supremacy.”
A 2007 report by the city’s Human Rights Commission called the Serra statue, the Pioneer Monument, the Christopher Columbus statue near Coit Tower and several others throughout the city “images of conquest.”
The question over what to do about the Pioneer Monument has been raised again and again without a satisfactory answer. The monument was funded by the estate of financier James Lick and was made by sculptor Frank Happers-berger. It was dedicated in 1894 outside the old City Hall at Hyde and Grove Streets. Though City Hall was destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906, the Pioneer Monument survived.
When plans for a new Main Library at the site were afoot in the early 1990s, preservationists wanted the Pioneer Monument to stay put while American Indians wanted it gone altogether. As usual, city officials pleased just about nobody by moving it to its current site. Just before its relocation, protesters threw rocks and red paint at it.
A compromise was reached in 1996, when a plaque was installed underneath the sculpture explaining that the monument “represents a conventional attitude of the 19th century.”
The plaque, it explains, “seeks to acknowledge the effect of this settlement on the California Native Americans,” including that their population plummeted from more than 300,000 in 1769 to 15,377 in 1900. This being San Francisco, even the wording of the plaque proved controversial and went through various iterations.
But the plaque might as well not even be there. Not only is it largely covered in bird droppings, but on Monday morning, I had to climb onto the raised platform underneath the sculpture and through tall plants to read it. There’s no way your average tourist or other casual passerby would know it was there, much less be able to read it from street level without considerable effort.
Plaque or no plaque, the late Chronicle columnist Herb Caen certainly had an opinion. In 1996, he said the Pioneer Monument “degrades the American Indian and good taste.”
“I say take a sledgehammer to it,” he wrote. “Schlock is one thing, kitsch is another, and my, what a sad collection of public art we do have.”
He had a point. As I wrote previously, the city’s 87 public statues depict just two real-life women. The fundraising for a third — the late writer Maya Angelou outside the Main Library — is proceeding slowly but surely.
So the grounds outside the library have a statue that has offended American Indians for more than 25 years, but still no real-life woman. Come on, we’re San Francisco. We can surely do better than that.