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The US Capitol in Washington DC has a Statuary Hall where each state gets two statues, chosen by the state in question. One of Washington state's two statues was of Oregon Trail pioneer and missionary and colonizer Marcus Whitman. The state legislature just voted--with bipartisan support!--to replace that statue with a statue of Billy Frank Jr, a Native American activist for treaty rights and environmental protection. It's an awesome achievement, and I'm proud of my state, but I find the way they did it interesting. Because it did have bipartisan support! Yes, many Republicans voted to replace an old white colonizer with an indigenous person!
But that's not how the people pushing for it framed the discussion. They never once breathed anything against Whitman. The movement to change the statue focused on Frank, and what a great guy he was, and how much he changed things, and shouldn't he be honored, etc., etc. Frank died a few years ago, just long enough to get a rosy glow in peoples' memories but not long enough ago to be forgotten. And when Whitman came up, oh, it was nothing against him, it's just, isn't Frank a more modern symbol of our state? And wouldn't it be nice if Whitman's statue could come home to the Walla Walla valley to a museum near where he lived?
(Of course, the thing is, that museum already HAS a copy of that statue, and it gets regularly vandalized by locals who hate the guy and his legacy and want the museum to change how it tells the story of white colonization of Washington, but that little detail mysteriously never got brought up in legislative and news discussions of the bill to change statues.)
And that's how they got the Republicans to support replacing a white colonizer with a Native American activist.
But that's not how the people pushing for it framed the discussion. They never once breathed anything against Whitman. The movement to change the statue focused on Frank, and what a great guy he was, and how much he changed things, and shouldn't he be honored, etc., etc. Frank died a few years ago, just long enough to get a rosy glow in peoples' memories but not long enough ago to be forgotten. And when Whitman came up, oh, it was nothing against him, it's just, isn't Frank a more modern symbol of our state? And wouldn't it be nice if Whitman's statue could come home to the Walla Walla valley to a museum near where he lived?
(Of course, the thing is, that museum already HAS a copy of that statue, and it gets regularly vandalized by locals who hate the guy and his legacy and want the museum to change how it tells the story of white colonization of Washington, but that little detail mysteriously never got brought up in legislative and news discussions of the bill to change statues.)
And that's how they got the Republicans to support replacing a white colonizer with a Native American activist.
