© American Renaissance/Jeff Chiu/AP
"Early Days" Statue depicts a Native American at the feet of a Spanish cowboy and Catholic missionary in San Francisco.
In the middle of the night and with dozens of Native Americans watching, San Francisco city workers tied safety ropes around a 124-year-old bronze statue and pulled. Carefully, they dislodged the piece from a granite platform and laid it on top of a flatbed truck. It was a moment stoked with meaning. After decades of effort, the Early Days statue, a symbol of colonization and oppression to many, was gone.
Those who gathered at the removal last week didn't celebrate with fire torches. They only prayed, sang hymns, and looked on morosely at the empty platform. That's what happens when civic institutions, in this case the city arts commissions, finally see a people as worthy of protection.
"I feel like it is a win. I feel good about it. [But] there is still a lot of work to be done," Desirae Harp, a Mishewal Ona*tsáTis (Wappo) and Diné (Navajo) tribe member told me.
Erected in the aftermath of the California mission era,
the Early Days statue depicts a Native American on his back, defeated, a Catholic priest above him pointing to the heavens, and an anglicized vaquero bestriding the scene in triumph. The statue is part of the Pioneer Monument celebrating the state's origins.
Native Americans saw it as dehumanizing art but no one had managed to convince politicians to take it down.
It wasn't until gender- and racially-diverse city boards, as well as backlash against Eurocentric depictions of dominance, that change came.
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