Statues do not tell our history
In the hill country of Wisconsin and Illinois, in the still-early days of our republic, two men who would go on to oppose each other over the fate of a nation, the future leaders of the Union and the Confederacy, served side by side in a war against Indigenous peoples united under Chief Black Hawk of the Saukenuk as his forces fought to retain autonomy in their ancestral lands.
The Black Hawk War of 1832, largely forgotten in the popular telling of the history of the United States, was a brief and brutal conflict involving the massacre of hundreds of Native combatants and civilians alike. It marked an escalation in the era of Indian removal in the Americas, whereby Native tribes were forcibly relocated through state-sponsored violence.
The practice of large-scale violence against Native tribes was already common at this point in the history of this continent, part and parcel with what might best be referred to as the American holocausts. Two future presidents of the Union (Zachary Taylor and Abraham Lincoln) and one of the Confederacy (Jefferson Davis) served in the American forces deployed in this war.
Lincoln himself was one of the most instrumental figures in dismantling the most brutal and entrenched systems whereby a different but related holocaust was perpetrated against people of African decent. The emancipation of Black people as a result of the Civil War did not, however, bring an end to the widespread violence perpetrated against Black people. They were not alone in suffering.
For years to come, Indigenous peoples would experience forcible relocations and cultural destruction. For hundreds of years, America was the land of slave hunters, Indigenous death marches, false treaties, stolen territory and outright lynchings. In other countries such as Germany and Israel, museums and memorials are used to remind people of the ways in which holocausts shape our present. They aim to teach us how to move past the hate that can lead to such unfathomable violence.
As we tear down statues that glorify the “great men” of our past, it is important to refocus the collective memory on the people and victims otherwise forgotten. Lincoln was neither the first nor the last American to fight in Indian wars, and Lincoln was not the originator of the push toward abolition and equal treatment of Blacks. Here in New Mexico, many of our cultural heroes were complicit in the unjust violence against Natives. New Mexico’s own Kit Carson, though he served in the Union during the Civil War, went on to hunt down Indigenous families using brutal scorched-earth tactics to forcibly relocate them in what became the Navajo Long Walk. Spanish colonial leaders such as Juan de Oñate and Don Diego de Vargas also are facing a reexamination for their roles in the early violence and subjugation of Indigenous peoples.
Yes, we should seek to dismantle the supposedly glorious history of these men. But it would be too easy to simply cast them as villains and place new heroes in their place. In many ways, we treat history as if it was something shaped by a few men. Really, those men played only a small part in a past sculpted by the wills of the people who allowed them to rise to prominence.
A statue is not history. We are history — our lineage, the stories we tell ourselves; and if we choose to forget our history, both the good and the terrible, we lose ourselves. If, in the summer of 2020, we are to tear down the monuments to the prominent and powerful men of our past, we should build something different and truer in their place.
In Washington, D.C., as well as in Albuquerque, there exist museums dedicated to the Jewish holocaust, which serve the noble purpose of bearing witness to the horrors of our collective history. Slavery museums and civil rights museums in the American South and beyond memorialize the hundreds of years of violence toward Black Americans. The best of these museums and monuments don’t focus on the story of a few powerful figures shaping history as they saw fit; they focus on the real human tragedy caused by hate and the sheer scale of how many lives can be destroyed by racial violence.
If we are ready to reckon with our past in this moment of national turmoil, we should remember in all its awful detail that for centuries our countrymen committed American holocausts against the ancestors of citizens living today with that legacy. We need to remember our worst moments over these long centuries to commit ourselves to a more peaceful and egalitarian future.