Obelisk longtime catalyst for rancor
City councilor’s motion in 1973 nearly led to removal; historical searches show Plaza monument served as affront to Native people
A look through Santa Fe history reveals the Plaza obelisk was in danger of falling 47 years before it was actually toppled by demonstrators in October.
Then, as now, the Civil War monument was controversial and feelings about its fate were complicated — tethered to long-simmering tensions over history, racism, ownership and bureaucracy that predated 1973, and lingered until it was felled on Indigenous Peoples Day.
But long before a group of activists turned the obelisk to bits of concrete, the Santa Fe City Council in 1973 came close to removing the monument.
A plaque bearing the word “savage Indians” had long grated on Native Americans, but Indigenous activist
groups have said the entire monument was an affront to Native Americans because it paid homage to Union soldiers who helped cement a claim to the territory for a nation that believed its destiny stretched westward.
Sam Pick, then a city councilor, made a motion to remove the statue. According to meeting minutes from the time, the vote carried, with the city’s mayor, Joe Valdes, noting he thought the only way to remove “savage” from the plaque was “by the complete removal of the monument unless someone could come up with another way of doing it.”
Contacted recently, Valdes, who was Santa Fe’s mayor from 1972-76, said he doesn’t remember the issue being divisive at the time, nor does he recall suggesting the entire monument should be removed if people found the plaque offensive.
In fact, Valdes said he now believes Santa Feans have never had a problem with the monument until recently. From Valdes’ recollection, that includes 40 mayors and decades of city councilors, despite 1973 meeting minutes to the contrary.
“They accepted whatever it was, and then it [the offensive term] was removed and after that was removed there was no big deal about it,” Valdes said.
“These young people and older people that supported the young ones to tear it down [earlier this year], they were totally out of order.”
Valdes said he does remember the City Council at one time discussing moving the obelisk to another location and replacing it with a statue of Spanish conquistador Don Diego de Vargas at the request of Caballeros de Vargas, an Hispanic heritage group.
“We felt after being denied by the state and the federal government we couldn’t do anything,” Valdes said. “At that time we put a wrought iron fence around it because there had been some people trying to dig it up or shave the ‘savage Indians’ off, and they did accomplish that particular thing.”
On that point, Valdes’ recollection is spot-on: In 1974, someone chiseled the offensive verbiage from the white marble.
Pick, who later became the city’s mayor, also said he doesn’t remember the details of his motion to remove the monument. But if some of the details have been lost to time, it is clear city officials — in ’73, and even many years earlier — were warned the obelisk would someday serve as a flashpoint.
Library searches, meeting minutes and newspaper stories reveal that discord over the obelisk had been roiling — sometimes below the surface, sometimes easily in view — for years if not decades. And at times, it seemed its presence or role in depicting history rankled Anglos, Hispanics and Native Americans.
The late Oliver La Farge, a columnist for The New Mexican, wrote in 1960 people were unhappy because some believed the monument honored Anglos at the expense of acknowledging Hispanic history.
“This belief is entirely false: its currency shows that too many of our Spanish Americans have forgotten a proud chapter in their own history,” wrote La Farge in a column headlined: “Record Put Straight on Odd Folk-Lore of Misinformation.”
He later wrote: “The monument refers to ‘savage Indians.’ It means exactly what it says, and furthermore, the term is accurate.”
The column was largely meant to dispel what La Farge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, journalist and anthropologist, saw as inaccurate beliefs about the monument, including that the word “savage” referred to members of New Mexico’s Pueblo people. La Farge wrote the plaque referred to the Navajo, Apache and Comanche tribes.
In a preface to an online reprinting of the column this summer, John Pen La Farge, the author’s son, argued his father had long fought for Native rights and was a former president of an organization that later became the Association of American Indian Affairs.
A year after Oliver La Farge’s column appeared, another voice was heard. Carlos Vigil, a member of Tesuque Pueblo, wrote in
The New Mexican about what the monument had meant to him ever since he’d been a student at Santa Fe Indian School.
“I have felt like a second-class citizen living in an alien land — a land which I always previously thought of as being my own and that of my forebears for untold centuries,” Vigil wrote.
“And why should future generations of American Indian Children continue to have this insulting reminder that the Conquerors considered themselves little more than blood-lusting beasts, not noble martyrs fighting for their homes?”
By 1967, as the city celebrated the 100th anniversary of the obelisk’s construction, opinions continued to vary on its aesthetics and meaning. Both in stories and letters to The New Mexican, some expressed indifference; others wanted a bandstand constructed in its place; still others said the monument was a testimony to the city’s history and deserved to remain intact.
Famed architect John Gaw Meem even worked on plans that would reshape the Plaza courtyard without an obelisk. The monument was to move to the grounds of the Capitol.
“It’s an antique,” a man named Sam Marsh said of the obelisk in a 1967 story. “Do we want a new look in Santa Fe? No. I want a warm nostalgia.”
By ’73’, however, it seemed clear nostalgia was on a collision course with controversy.
As the City Council considered whether to take down the monument, Val Cordova, former chairman of the All Pueblo Council of Governors, said a failure to remove the obelisk could result in people taking matters into their own hands, according to news accounts at the time.
“These are young people and these are violent times,” Cordova said. “We’re inviting this type of thing.”
Cordova’s warning went unheeded: On the same day it voted to remove the obelisk, in part because it feared the city would lose federal restoration funding for the Plaza (designated as a historic landmark in 1962), the City Council rescinded the vote.
The relationship between the Plaza and the obelisk has always been complex, at least in terms of jurisdiction. According to a letter cited in 1973 meeting minutes from David King, a former state treasurer and nephew of former Gov. Bruce King, the city didn’t actually own the monument. The state did.
In another instance of the past foretelling the future, legal issues over the ownership of the obelisk was one of the hurdles current Mayor Alan Webber listed after vowing to remove the monument during nationwide protests over racism and social justice this summer.
Webber said in a recent interview he wasn’t aware when he made that promise how complicated it would actually be to follow through. His motivation to call for the obelisk’s removal, he said, was prompted by a shooting at a monument demonstration in Albuquerque and concerns about similar violence in Santa Fe.
“I wanted to step into that moment and attempt to provide calm and peace and a way forward, which was to safely remove objects that were creating controversy and then provide time and space for a communitywide conversation about how do we add context and understanding to these objects and to the history that is so deep in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico,” Webber said. “That was my intent.”
But Webber’s inaction did not go unnoticed.
Calling it “the last in a long line of broken promises that white men have made to Native people,” Elena Ortiz, an organizer with the Indigenous social justice group Red Nation, said some in the community had had enough.
“And the difference on that day in October is that we stopped taking that as an answer,” she said. “He [Webber] promised it would come down. It came down.”
The obelisk’s destruction, of course, has created its own waves of controversy, just as its presence had in the 1970s, ’60s and earlier. For some, angered by the events of Oct. 12, the monument was a part of the city’s history and deserved to be preserved.
Former City Councilor Ron Trujillo, once a political rival of Webber’s, said he remains angry about its fall — and the decision by Webber to remove the statue of Don Diego de Vargas from Cathedral Park in June.
“As someone of Hispanic descent, I’m proud of who I am and I’m proud of where I came from,” he said. “I know the controversy with conquistadors, but without Oñate and de Vargas, we wouldn’t be in the city. Those are my ancestors.”
For others, the end of the obelisk puts a punctuation mark on discord that had been a long time coming.
Ortiz, who was on the Plaza on Oct. 12, said the end of the obelisk spurred celebration and prompted tears of joy for others near her.
“Women from all over the pueblos who were there cried when it came down, and they were tears of joy,” Ortiz said. “Older women, younger women, from Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo who cried: It’s finally down. And they may not have taken part in any of it, but there was happiness.”