George Rogers Clark statue removed from the campus – The Cavalier Daily

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The University‘s George Rogers Clark statue was removed from the site Sunday morning after the city of Charlottesville removed two Confederate statues and one of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacagawea on Saturday.

Dozens of community members gathered to watch the Team Henry Enterprises contract crew applaud and cheer as they lifted the depiction of the Revolutionary War figure from its pedestal. The statue shows Clark on horseback with a crew behind him invading a group of Native Americans. Native American and community activists have for years denounced the imagery as an example of white supremacy and colonial violence.

The statue was erected in 1921 and commissioned by Charlottesville philanthropist Paul Goodloe McIntire. The namesake of the School of Commerce and the university’s arts and music departments, McIntire, also funded the city statues of Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Lewis and Clark, which fell on Saturday.

The crew drove the statue off site at around 10am and then began deconstructing the statue’s base. On the pedestal is engraved Clark’s name and the designation “Conqueror of the Northwest”, indicating his role in the United States through the forcible displacement of the Native Americans.

The bases of the three city statues, which were relocated on Saturday, will be removed at a later date, while construction on campus will continue throughout the week, according to university spokesman Brian Coy. The university plans to put the statue of George Rogers Clark in storage and work with a committee to determine a suitable location.

A university spokesman said The daily progress on Saturday that the statue would be removed, university deputy spokesman Brian Coy confirmed to The Cavalier Daily.

“As recommended in the Racial Equity Task Force report and approved by the Visitors Committee in September 2020, the university has entered into a contract to remove the George Rogers Clark from University Avenue,” said Coy.

The Visitors Committee approved the university’s Racial Equity Task Force suggestion that the statue will be removed in September. Anthony Guy Lopez, head of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Group, recalled in an earlier interview with The Cavalier Daily his advocacy of advocating the statue during the tenure of John T. Casteen III and before the tenure of University President Jim Ryan Remove Teresa Sullivan. Lopez chaired the George Rogers Clark Statue Disposition Committee and is a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe.

While the statue’s removal is an important step in correcting the Native American representation at the university, Lopez says structural work still needs to be done. He noted that indigenous studies still lack a sustainable, established academic program that goes beyond a minor.

“This is a fresh start for the university, but I think if we’re not careful, if we don’t replace the statue with something essential … it’s just an obliteration,” Lopez said in an interview with The Cavalier Daily on Sunday. “That is all we have achieved – the erasure of the only Indian presence at the university.”

In August 2019, a local petition for the university to remove the statue received 675 signatures. Ryan forwarded the recommendation to the University President’s Commission on Universities in the Age of Segregation.

Months later, the Native American Student Union, Latinx Student Alliance, Political Latinxs United for Movement and Action in Society, Virginia Student Environmental Coalition and Central Americans for Empowerment jointly held a march to the site to commemorate Indigenous Peoples Day national celebration of Columbus Day. The following month the statue was defaced with red paint, which the university covered with a tarpaulin and later removed.

Last summer UVAToday published one account the history of the statue as one of the four dividing monuments erected in Charlottesville between 1916 and 1924. PCUAS researchers described them as “powerful symbols of white supremacy”.

“The Lee and Jackson statues perpetuate the myth of the lost cause and actively distort American history,” the report said. “The memorials of George Rogers Clark and Lewis and Clark do the same thing – they help maintain many of the most destructive myths about the Indians.”

Protesters gathered around the statue ahead of the board’s vote in September, urging the university to do more than just remove the structure, with demands that the establishment of a U.Va. Native American Foundation to return university land to the Monacan Nation, re-zoning the area to allow for a multi-story building, and erecting an indigenous cultural center in place of the statue. Proponents add that the university must take such action with formal consultation of tribal officials and establish a full-time tribal liaison office at the university.

“The statue expressed a certain truth about the legacy of American treatment of indigenous peoples,” said Lopez, reiterating the call for the university to exert influence beyond the removal of the statue. “You know there was some truth in the statute, there was value in it. But without them there – without a really substantial obligation – we were deleted. “

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