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But the biggest wars are still over land, particularly over toxic and radioactive waste disposal on the land still held by Native Americans, wars to unload the excreta of technology upon the involuntary symbols of a pristine continent. (The same exemption from state regulation makes both dumping and gaming possible.) I participated in a Native American land war once. At stake was whether the U.S. government or the Western Shoshone Nation owns much of Nevada; the test case considered whether two Western Shoshone elders, the Dann sisters, had to pay federal grazing fees for running their livestock on the contested land.

The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and, because all the evidence was on the Shoshone side, the government was forced to make up a fictitious date of taking for the land it had forgotten to steal in the last century. In 1979, the courts decided that the land had been “taken” in 1872, though nothing resembling taking had actually happened that year, or any other, to the still largely unfenced and sparsely inhabited land, and no paperwork documents a transfer of land by any means. Transplanted elsewhere, the outrageousness of this historical revisionism resonates more strangely: imagine, if you will, that France claims Napoleon did conquer Russia and thereby asserts sovereignty over it in the present; or recall the occasions when Ronald Reagan cited events from the movies as historical fact. It is as though the courts asserted that Fess Parker and John Wayne beat the Mexicans at the Alamo.

The decision was economic: the federal government could afford to buy
eastern Nevada for $26 million at 1872 prices (without interest), but not at late twentieth-century prices. The fact that it wasn’t for sale didn’t enter the calculations. The Dann sisters didn’t respect the court’s rulings, or its jurisdiction. So in 1992, the government hired cowboys from Utah to steal the sisters’ cows from the contested land. I was one of the supporters at the Dann ranch the day of the first cattle raid, April 10, 1992, and though I missed the actual raid, a stalwart German supporter caught it all on videotape with Carrie Dann’s camcorder (along with camcorders, walkie-talkies, faxes, computers, and radio-telephones played a part in the defense; information was the most powerful weapon in our nonviolent defense project). The raid took place in the morning. Carrie Dann single-handedly prevented the government men and the rent-a-buckaroos from loading her rounded-up cows into their cattle trucks by occupying the loading chute.

In the afternoon, we all watched it on TV with Carrie’s humorous live narration. A few days later, I took the videotape to San Francisco and convinced a member of Paper Tiger TV to cut the footage into a short documentary. Within a couple of weeks, it was being screened in theaters (it opened in San Francisco as the short before Craig Baldwin’s revisionist film
O No Coronado!
, which ends in the Coronado shopping plaza in Santa Fe), broadcast on public access TV, and distributed to activists. The Danns and their allies had become postmodern Westerners, living simultaneously in art and life, even if their version of history clashed with the cowboys’ master narrative.

 

The Struggle of Dawning Intelligence
Creating, Revising, and Recognizing
Native American Monuments
[1999]

“The celebration of the past can easily be made to play politics, and monuments are linchpins of this process,” writes Lucy Lippard, and nowhere is this more true than with monuments involving Native Americans. European Americans have long been fascinated with Native Americans, but not with their history, which often implicates early emigrants and undermines the heroic versions of history preserved in songs, school lessons—and monuments. In recent years, that history has been told more accurately and more audibly, with often turbulent results. In earlier versions, Native Americans either were the adversaries in a Manifest Destiny version of history or were outside history altogether, as timeless and infinitely appropriable totemic figures. Almost all Native American monuments commemorate Indian-European interaction rather than autonomous indigenous history, and only a handful of helpful or nonadversarial Indians—Squanto, Sacajawea—are remembered by name in public monuments. Coming to terms with that history has generated a new era of Indian wars, with iconography and words as the weapons this time around.

Earlier monuments are often merely evasive. On the coast of northernmost California, there is a National Historic Landmark plaque whose text names “Indian/Gunther Island” and asserts: “This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America.” What the plaque fails to mention is the nature of that significance: on this island, formerly known as Tolowot, settlers axed to death all the women, children, old, and infirm of the Indian village while the men were out hunting. Others celebrate the “us” in the
old “us/them” model of Euro-American/Native American history. The central plaza of Santa Fe, New Mexico, features a monument to those who died fighting “savage Indians” (although guerrilla reformists chiseled off the word
savage
); in front of one of its civic buildings is an obelisk commemorating Kit Carson, although it doesn’t mention whether he’s being commemorated as an expansionist scout or the scourge of the Navajo. Such monuments are predicated on an obsolete idea of who the public is: more and more Americans come from neither side of the historic “us/them,” while if “us” now means the mainstream rather than an ethnicity, most Native Americans are participants in it to varying degrees.

San Francisco generated a lot of conflict when it tried to adjust one monument. The Pioneer Monument in San Francisco’s Civic Center was dedicated on Thanksgiving Day 1894, less than half a century after California became part of the United States. The eight-hundred-ton piece, which serves as a statement about the Americanization of California, is a massive hunk of iconography, with thirty-seven bronze elements on five granite pedestals, including a forty-seven-foot-high central figure, four sculpture groupings on lower surrounding pedestals, commemorative names, bas-reliefs of representative events, medallions, and captions. Women, like Native Americans, have more often appeared as emblems than as individuals in public sculpture, and the Athena-like figure of Eureka standing atop the central structure along with a California grizzly is no exception. Two of the subsidiary sculpture groupings, allegories of commerce and agriculture represented as women, are standard-issue, too; although the artist, Frank Happersberger, was born in California, he learned his academic-classical clichés during years of study in Munich. The other two groupings are more specific and more interesting. One, captioned “In ’49,” shows a trio kneeling with picks and pans. The other grouping is where the trouble began.

Captioned “Early Days,” it is meant to represent the peoples who lived in California before the Yankees. In the rear is a dashing vaquero; in the middle, a figure wearing a monk’s habit and leaning over the figure of a prone Indian, who is in front. While the other two figures have upraised hands—the vaquero is energetically twirling a now-vanished lariat, the priest is chastising with upraised finger—the Indian’s arms are draped resignedly across his body, as if to suggest
that his space is contracting as that of the others is expanding. From left of center, it looks as if the vaquero and the priest are raising up invisible whips to lash the Indian. With his two feathers, braids, lanky body, and Roman nose, this representative Indian looks more like the Last of the Mohicans than like most Native Californians, and he is clearly an older cousin of James Earle Fraser’s
The End of the Trail
, the famous sculpture of the downcast warrior slumped on his drooping horse that was first exhibited at San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 and now sits in Visalia, in central California. Happersberger’s grouping represents the Spanish and Mexican eras, during which the Franciscan missions were built to convert—into Christians and laborers—the indigenous inhabitants of the coast. According to the San Francisco Municipal Report of 1893–1894, “The group of figures fronting the City Hall consists of a native over whom bends a Catholic priest, endeavoring to convey to the Indian some religious knowledge. On his face you may see the struggle of dawning intelligence.”

The 1906 earthquake destroyed the City Hall that this first version faced, but the monument survived unmoved until a few years ago. It was slated to be relocated to accommodate the new public library when the San Francisco Arts Commission received a letter from Martina O’Dea, “on behalf of the American Indian Movement Confederation and the Native American and Indigenous people of the San Francisco Bay Area,” early in 1995. “We request,” she wrote, “the removal of a monument which symbolizes the humiliation, degradation, genocide and sorrow inflicted upon this country’s indigenous people by a foreign invader, through religious persecution and ethnic prejudice.” The Arts Commission, which administers such civic sculptures, decided instead to attach a plaque providing a contemporary interpretation of the grouping. An early draft stated, “In 1769, the missionaries first came to California with the intent of converting the state’s 300,000 Native Americans to Christianity. With their efforts over in 1834, the missionaries left behind about 56,000 converts—and 150,000 dead. Half of the original Native American population had perished during this time from the whites’ diseases, armed attacks, and mistreatment.”

Although the draft text was intended to counter the image of oppression conveyed by the statue, it actually reinforced its message by linking indigenous and
Spanish/Mexican history with the “Early Days,” as if the Spanish and the Mexicans had superseded the Indians before fading away themselves. Clearly neither group was imagined as part of the audience Happersberger addressed, the audience that identified with westward migration and a romanticized version of the Gold Rush. In representing the domination of Indians by the Spanish, the sculpture pitted against each other, then and now, two peoples who had both suffered in the Americanization of California—and presumed that neither would be its audience, though in the 1990s both are.

The proposed revision of the text prompted both the local Spanish consul and the Catholic archbishop to write indignant letters to the mayor. Their point was that the most brutal treatment and precipitous population decline of Native Californians came with the Gold Rush, not the mission era (although being less brutal than the Forty-Niners is a dubious distinction). Should the text appear, said Consul General Camilo Alonso-Vega, “many of us, including myself, would feel discriminated against and indelibly unwelcome at the very core of this city founded by Spaniards.” Alonso-Vega missed the point that the statue had for a century made indigenous Americans feel those very things. Archbishop William J. Levada even suggested another interpretation of the grouping: “a Franciscan missionary directs the attention of a native American and a vaquero heavenward.” Most of us who are not archbishops distrust authority more than did the citizens of 1894; an image of one man asserting such intensely bodily authority over another would appear ominous to many viewers even without historical contextualization.

Some suggested that the Pioneer Monument be replaced with other monuments: the premise of these proposed monuments was that the oppression was not sufficiently obvious and that the wrongs done to indigenous Americans
should
be represented, even more explicitly. One proposal called for a forty-ton stone block crushing an Indian, another for a Promethean figure chained to a rock. O’Dea’s original complaint was that the sculpture grouping commemorated “the crimes committed against indigenous Americans,” though she may have meant that it celebrates or sanitizes those crimes. She didn’t want them forgotten, but rather remembered differently.

The whole ruckus was decried by local newspaper columnists and by State Librarian and historian Kevin Starr as “political correctness.” The latter wrote, “How can San Francisco, or any city for that matter, hope to address its pressing problems, hope to achieve community, when an agency of government—for whatever perverse and distorted reasons—stigmatizes a culture and a religion with horrific charges of genocidal intent?” It is surprising that Starr ignored the many, many historical statements—albeit by Protestants—demonstrating genocidal desires and expectations; there was, for instance, California governor Peter Burnett’s 1851 declaration to the new state legislature “that a war of extermination would continue to be waged until the Indian race should become extinct, and that it was beyond the power or wisdom of men to avert the inevitable destiny,” which, like many similar statements, suggested that the war and the extinction were mysteriously inevitable and even more mysteriously unlinked.

Believing that Indians were vanishing, then and now, seems to have been wishful thinking, a wish for the circumstances under which monuments such as this could survive ideologically intact for a unified “us” untroubled and un-enlarged by a “them” who had been safely relegated to the ahistorical realm of the emblematic. As emblems, they would be national ancestor-spirits rather than the ancestors of particular individuals with sometimes inconvenient political demands. It is this conveniently vague fading away, a disappearance for which no one bears responsibility, that is represented in the Pioneer Monument, as well as in such ideologically similar works as
The End of the Trail
and Edward Curtis’s reconfigured photographs.

The text that was finally put on the bronze plaque in front of “Early Days” reads, in part, “At least 300,000 Native people—and perhaps far more—lived in California at the time of the first settlement in 1769. During contact with colonizers from Europe and the United States, the Native population of California was devastated by disease, malnutrition, and armed attacks. The most dramatic decline of the Native population occurred in the years following the discovery of gold in 1848.” From a text that commented on the grouping, it has become a text that draws attention away from it, toward the Forty-Niners on the opposite side
of the monument, and that also underscores the congratulatory tone of the whole ensemble. It concludes with the statement that, in 1990, the indigenous American population of the state was 236,078 (though it left out the fact that many of those are not Native Californians). Having weathered the reaction, the Arts Commission has permanently reoriented the meaning of the sculpture—has made it an artifact rather than an expression of public sentiment.

BOOK: Storming the Gates of Paradise
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