Read Online Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit - Free Book Online

reinforced its message by linking indigenous andSpanish/Mexican history with the “Early Days,” as if the Spanish and the Mexicans had superseded the Indians before fading away themselves.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