![]() ![]() Beginning in 1875, the bishop arranged for more than 4,000 Catholic families to homestead across 400,000 acres of western Minnesota. They began to subsidize new settlements, with three separate railroads naming the bishop of St. During an 1870s gold rush, railroad companies began building lines across the Great Plains toward the new boomtowns. ![]() Land loss and religious change are deeply tied together in the history of Minnesota. Photo by Charles Van Schaick / Wisconsin Historical Society / Getty Images The seated student student holds a package wrapped in paper, most likely containing his belongings for boarding school. Three Native American boys pose for a studio portrait in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in 1910. “When Columbus came here, he brought with him Jesus, Satan and alcohol,” Forcia said. This means he can explain what he hoped to achieve by doing so-and why it was worth the risk.įor Forcia, toppling the Columbus statue wasn’t about the distant past-it was about the way that those changes in Indigenous people’s names and religion continue to reverberate today. Forcia, however, has taken full, public responsibility for toppling a monument. They likely wanted to avoid the potentially heavy criminal and financial penalties for such acts. Most of these activists concealed their faces or struck at night. Protesters pulled down only 13 Confederate monuments and 22 monuments to other controversial historical figures like Columbus. In reality, of the 214 monuments that came down after the death of George Floyd, 179 -over 80 percent-were removed officially, following decisions by local authorities. ![]() The scene played on the news so often that you’d be forgiven for assuming that more monuments shared Columbus’ fate. Videos of the crowd tugging Columbus off his base that day provided some of the defining visuals of summer 2020. Columbus’ deportation would not be as grand as Forcia had imagined, but he would do his best. So, on the morning of June 10, Forcia issued an invitation on Facebook for people to meet him at the statue at 5 p.m. Paul crowd of thousands, and he had promised himself that a monument “put up in broad daylight … should come down in broad daylight.” “I panicked because I had plans for that statue.” The Columbus statue had been unveiled decades earlier in front of a St. Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public MonumentsĪ leading expert on the past, present, and future of public monuments in America. Forcia, a longtime Indigenous activist, heard through his network that someone else was planning to take down Minnesota’s Columbus under the cover of darkness. A few hours later, police discovered that someone had decapitated a Columbus in a park in Boston. “I wanted them to bring their drums and their outfits,” he said when describing his vision, “their dance, their food, their art and their history.”īut then, on the night of June 9, 2020, protesters in Richmond, Virginia, tore down a statue of Columbus, set it on fire and rolled it into a lake. He would invite the Somali and Hmong communities, too-everyone living in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. His Bad River Anishinaabe relatives, along with representatives from other Indigenous groups living in Minnesota, would fill the state capitol lawn with drummers and dancers, sending song and the ringing of jingle dresses into the air around a ten-foot bronze statue of Christopher Columbus that had stood there since 1931.
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