Challenges to Confederate and colonialist monuments expanded dramatically in the wake of the 2015 mass shooting of Black parishioners at a Charleston church and the murder of protester Heather Heyer near the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Protesters splashed red paint and spray-painted Black Lives Matter (BLM) slogans on Confederate monuments, including a Robert E. Lee statue on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. By 2020, BLM and anti-colonist protests spread across the nation and around the world.
These protests targeted statues of enslavers and U.S. expansionists, including presidents like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as well as those depicting generic White pioneers. Portland’s “Promised Land” statue, which had been controversial in the 1990s but forgotten since its installation in a (then) less prominent location, became a center of nightly BLM protests in the summer of 2020.
As protests intensified across the nation, activists began to tear down both Confederate and colonialist monuments. Some were destroyed while city officials moved others, like “The Promised Land,” for safekeeping.
Many U.S. communities responded by erecting more inclusive public monuments. New York City dedicated a new “Women’s Rights Pioneers” monument — the first to depict historic women in statue-laden Central Park in 2020. Organizers in Chelsea, Mich., sought to combat underrepresentation of Native women by erecting a statue of an Indigenous woman to symbolize female leaders of all races and ethnicities in 2021.
Yet as many communities have invested in more inclusive statues, vandals have disproportionately targeted monuments to Native women, evidence of a different type of protest. In 2021, Kansas City, Mo., marked Missouri’s bicentennial by dedicating a new monument — sculptures created by Kwan Wu to commemorate French trader François Chouteau and the Native American men and women with whom he established a trading post 200 years earlier. Within 10 days of its dedication, vandals stole the bronze statue of an unnamed Osage woman, leaving the rest of the installation untouched.
Law enforcement recovered the Osage woman in pieces, presumably ready to be melted down or sold for scrap. Carole Kadue-Blackwood (Kickapoo), a case manager with the Kansas City Indian Center, told NPR that “her community has grown accustomed to incidents of vandalism and theft,” which dehumanize Native people.
Then late last month, thieves vandalized and stole a statue of Marjorie Tallchief sculpted by local Cherokee artist Gary Hensen from the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum, part of the “Five Moons” installation honoring Native ballerinas from Oklahoma. Portions of the Tallchief statue were sold for scrap a few days later; most have been recovered and the statue is being restored.