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SPEAKER_11: The photo was a Polaroid of a cut off riding boot with a huge Spanish spur all in bronze. And I read the note. The note hinted that the bronze foot came from a statue of a man named Juan de Oñate seated on a horse.
SPEAKER_13: It was part of a monument on the side of a rural highway near where Oñate founded the first Spanish colony in New Mexico back in 1598. Larry figured this was probably a hoax.
SPEAKER_12: This is Stan Elkhorn, a reporter with the investigative podcast Reveal.
SPEAKER_13: There are collaborators on the story today.
SPEAKER_12: So he handed the tip off to the newsroom and a reporter called up the visitor center at the Oñate monument. And asked, is your statue missing a right foot?
SPEAKER_11: And the guy said, what? And he went out and checked, came back and he was, you know, in shock. He said it's gone.
SPEAKER_12: Oñate is one of the world's lesser known conquistadors, but his name is all over New Mexico. There are Oñate streets, Oñate schools. For decades, there was an annual fiesta where one lucky guy would get to be Oñate, complete with a cape and helmet. There's even a song.
SPEAKER_12: In parts of New Mexico, he's treated as a kind of founding father.
SPEAKER_13: But history is not all song and dance and wearing capes. He was a conquistador after all.
SPEAKER_12: The envelope Larry got also included an excerpt from a history book on Oñate's treatment of New Mexico's native people. It described an incident that ended with Oñate sentencing a group of men from Acoma Pueblo to each have one foot chopped off. If the symbolism of removing the statue's foot was unclear, the note made it explicit.
SPEAKER_11: It said, we took the liberty of removing Oñate's right foot on behalf of our brothers and sisters at Acoma Pueblo. We will be melting this foot down and casting small medallions to be sold to those who are historically ignorant.
SPEAKER_13: The statue's sculpture cast a new right foot and reattached it. The medallions never turned up, but the story stuck. It got picked up by NPR and the New York Times.
SPEAKER_12: I was a seventh grader in Albuquerque at the time, and what I remember is how the subject I found most boring, history, was suddenly this exciting mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Who stole Oñate's foot? And then there was the timing.
SPEAKER_13: 1998 was the 400th anniversary of Oñate's arrival. There were corto centenario celebrations planned all over the state. There would be theater, parades, a commemorative stamp. In a second note to the paper, these so-called friends of Acoma wrote, We see no glory in celebrating Oñate's fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it. In other words, the point of cutting off the statue's foot was to spoil the party. And the centerpiece of that party that got a mention in all the foot-cutting stories
SPEAKER_12: was a corto centenario memorial being planned for Albuquerque's historic center. The proposal? Another bronze statue of Juan de Oñate. This one right in the middle of New Mexico's biggest city.
SPEAKER_13: But with all this new attention on Oñate, the second statue wasn't going to get built without a fight. I still didn't see the storm that was coming. It was still in its infancy.
SPEAKER_04: Conchita Lucero was one of the organizers of the 400th anniversary celebrations in Albuquerque, and one of the most passionate advocates for a new Oñate statue.
SPEAKER_13: A passion that goes back to her childhood, growing up in 1950s New Mexico, knowing almost nothing about Oñate, or the state's two centuries as a Spanish colony.
SPEAKER_04: When I was a child, at 10 years of age, I asked my grandmother, who was a schoolteacher, I was reading American history books, I said, Did our people do anything? You know, that's how I felt. She didn't know New Mexico history.
SPEAKER_12: All Conchita knew was that her Spanish ancestors had come to the state centuries before the Anglo classmates, who called people like her dirty Mexicans, or the Anglo teachers who kept her out of a leadership club. And she knew that racism and ignorance of history were somehow connected.
SPEAKER_04: If we make you feel like the underdog, and then we take away your history and take away your knowledge, you're starting from scratch. Conversations, you don't know how to even participate. You just let the other guy put you down.
SPEAKER_13: Conchita thought if she could just search out her own European roots, it would help her fight back. None of this is uncommon in New Mexico, where people have been reaching back to their colonial roots and identifying as Spanish since the 1800s.
SPEAKER_12: After Conchita retired, she found a lot of like minds in local genealogical and historical societies. She learned how to use birth and death and baptism records to trace her family tree. There was the occasional Native American ancestor, but she was most excited to find branches like the one that extended back to a Spanish captain, who brought his wife and kids through the Chihuahuan desert on Oneate's 1598 expedition. She saw them as having transformed the region by bringing livestock and Catholicism and the Spanish language. You'd start finding your family members and you were going, wow, I never knew they did all of this.
SPEAKER_04: Did it change how you saw yourself?
SPEAKER_04: Yes. I never argued that one person wasn't as good as the other, but sometimes you were made to feel inferior. And at that point, that inferiority left. And so it was that Conchita was on the Corto Centenario Committee when they met with the Albuquerque Arts Board to discuss their request for a prominent new statue of Juan de Oneate,
SPEAKER_12: the man they called the father of the Hispanic culture and our state.
SPEAKER_13: And who the Friends of Acoma accused of destroying Native people's way of life.
SPEAKER_12: Was what happened at Acoma brought up?
SPEAKER_16: No.
SPEAKER_12: And was it on your mind?
SPEAKER_04: No.
SPEAKER_12: Was it something that you knew about? I wasn't as versed in it as I have become.
SPEAKER_12: For people who don't know Acoma, what is that? This is Alida or Tweedie Swazo, an Acoma woman who would become an outspoken opponent of an Oneate statue in Albuquerque.
SPEAKER_06: Acoma is the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States. And it sits on a mesa, 375 feet above the valley below. She actually carries a postcard of Acoma to show people when she travels.
SPEAKER_13: It's a village built on top of a mesa, which if you're not from the desert is like a huge rock pedestal. And that mesa just towers over the flat, empty plain below. All of it a hundred shades of brown from light tan to deep rust. It's incredible. The tough thing with radio is you don't have pictures.
SPEAKER_12: Yeah. How to help people visualize it because it's like no other place on earth. No, it's not.
SPEAKER_06: It's beautiful. It's desert and rocks and sandstone and that's where I come from, you know. And unlike the dozens of pueblos that disappeared after the arrival of the Spanish, Acoma is still here.
SPEAKER_12: Each year, tens of thousands of tourists drive an hour west of Albuquerque and then take a tour bus up a steep road to the top of the mesa.
SPEAKER_01: So just watch yourself. Don't get too close to the edge. If you happen to fall over the edge, this is the end of your tour and no refunds will be given. So just keep that in mind. On top, you can see buildings made of mud and sandstone.
SPEAKER_12: The tour guides say date back to the 1100s.
SPEAKER_01: If you think about it, these houses have been passed down through the same family for almost a thousand years now. So now we're going to be walking past some of the older houses right up here, folks.
SPEAKER_12: All along the tour, there are tables where Acoma artists sell their wares, mostly pottery.
SPEAKER_10: These pots are made from the area here, about two miles.
SPEAKER_01: But it's not just a tourist attraction.
SPEAKER_12: There are 15 families that live up top year round and hundreds more like Tweedies who go there for special occasions. Funerals, deaths, religious, fiestas, we were always there.
SPEAKER_06: What did you know about the history of your people in that place?
SPEAKER_06: That we came from the underworld on the back of Grandmother Spider. We wandered the earth and when we got to where Acoma was, we were told this is where we're supposed to be. That's what I knew, you know, that we've been there forever.
SPEAKER_12: Tweedie also knew that when the Spanish arrived, they did terrible things to her ancestors. But she didn't know the details. Historians know many of those details today because they were written down by the Spanish in letters and legal documents.
SPEAKER_13: These documents, to quote Onate's best known biographer, skim the surface of events and sometimes present Onate, quote, as he wished to be seen, not as things actually were.
SPEAKER_12: Which makes their description of what happened at Acoma all the more shocking. After 13 of Onate's men came looking for food and were killed, Onate declared a war of blood and fire. In the most brutal account of the battle that followed, Onate's soldiers killed hundreds of men, women and children, stabbed prisoners and threw them off the mesa and set fires that suffocated women and children who had taken shelter in sacred rooms known as kivas. They then rounded up 500 prisoners and put them on trial.
SPEAKER_13: Onate sentenced those over 12 years old to 20 years of slavery. Those under 12, he separated from their families, giving the girls to the church and the boys to the captain who just destroyed their village.
SPEAKER_12: And then there's the most infamous detail in a document signed by Onate himself. It says, the males who are over 25 years of age, I sentence to have one foot cut off.
SPEAKER_13: His cruelty to the innocent of Acoma was one of the 12 crimes for which Onate himself would later be tried and convicted by the Spanish crown. As punishment, he would be banished permanently from the territories of New Mexico.
SPEAKER_12: This is the history that Tweedie and I and many other New Mexicans were learning for the first time as news of the stolen foot ricocheted around the state. That was the beginning of it. That was everybody's first awareness.
SPEAKER_12: And at the same time, we were also learning that the city of Albuquerque was planning to build this new, much more prominent statue of Onate.
SPEAKER_06: He had been cast out of New Mexico forever. And now you want to bring him back and put him on a statue? It's still mind boggling.
SPEAKER_12: How Onate went from a banished conquistador to a father of New Mexico that people wanted to put on a statue is a story for another podcast. But the simple answer is he was first. The first to build a European colony in the region, even if that colony was soon abandoned. He was among the first to bring wheat and sheep and Catholicism. And because every people needs a founding figure, Spanish New Mexico made Juan de Onate its George Washington. Even if he had been cast out forever.
SPEAKER_13: But it did not take long for the Albuquerque Arts Board to realize that Juan de Onate was not everyone's idea of a founding father. They could see that another triumphant statue of him on a horse would be a bad look for the city. So by the time the foot was cut off of the old statue on the side of the highway, they made a few changes to the plan. The memorial would need to depict not just Onate, but also the peaceful settlers who came with him and the Native Americans who preceded and survived him.
SPEAKER_12: And the exact form the memorial would take would be up to a team of artists.
SPEAKER_13: They had a team of two, but right before the newspapers got wind of the missing foot, they decided to add a third.
SPEAKER_12: When Nora Naranjo Morse got the call, she was in the place where she's most comfortable. Her studio.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, who wouldn't want to be here, right? In the studio with a fireplace and the rain.
SPEAKER_12: On the phone was the Director of Public Art for the City of Albuquerque, asking if she wanted to be part of a tri-cultural collaboration. It would be the Hispanic artist who had built the statue that had its foot stolen, an Anglo artist, and her, a Tewa Indian artist from the Santa Clara Pueblo.
SPEAKER_05: The call was so out of the blue. This was a public art project. I'd never done public art, really. This was with other people. I had been working solo, so I didn't really know. I was listening.
SPEAKER_12: And did you say yes right then, or do you remember how the phone called? Yes. I said yes right away because I opened my mouth and I said yes, and then afterwards I thought, oh, I wonder what this is going to be like.
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_13: She'd find out when she showed up for that first meeting. In an institutional room with fluorescent lighting and a chalkboard, the other artists wheeled in a model of a statue they'd already put together. It was another triumphant statue of Juan de Oñate on a horse.
SPEAKER_05: And that's when they began to talk about the granite pedestal and how I could use it.
SPEAKER_12: The pedestal beneath Oñate's horse's feet. Right.
SPEAKER_05: I felt insulted. I felt hurt. I felt marginalized. I didn't think I could do that. Although in myself, I was thinking that there was a solution. That art could tell a story that was truthful.
SPEAKER_13: Nora quite literally refused to put Oñate on a pedestal, and the artists went back to the drawing board.
SPEAKER_12: But now Nora was in the public eye, and soon she started getting calls from other Pueblo people who wanted her to leave the project entirely in protest.
SPEAKER_05: I didn't do that. And when I refused, I got some, I think people were disappointed. But I realized that by me staying in the game, I would at least be able to fight for that voice that I think was so important. Not just my artistic voice, but the voice of these people that had gone through this incredible experience that changed their culture completely. And I kept going back to those things.
SPEAKER_13: The year of the 400th anniversary, 1998, came and went, and there was still no plan for the memorial.
SPEAKER_12: The city would not give up. All the attention had made the memorial a very public test of whether the state was the land of tri-cultural harmony that it claimed to be. And so every time the process hit an impasse, the city just threw more time and money at it, hiring mediators and forming committees.
SPEAKER_13: At one point, one of those committees came up with a plan that would have restarted the whole artistic process, a plan Conchita's side couldn't tolerate. And called for a memorial without Oneate.
SPEAKER_12: And would focus on coexistence of Hispanics and the indigenous.
SPEAKER_04: Well then we said it wasn't our celebration. You know, it's your celebration now, it's not ours. You know, you don't get invited to a wedding, you don't start telling the bride and the groom, you should have had it this way or that way, or... And that's what it was, it was our celebration.
SPEAKER_12: What was your celebration with public money in a public space that's in a city that has people of all different backgrounds?
SPEAKER_04: The grant was for our celebration, not for the Acoma celebration or for anybody else's.
SPEAKER_13: As far as Conchita's group was concerned, the presence of Oneate was non-negotiable, which made it hard to negotiate. In the end, there simply was no single design that everyone could agree on. In fact, eventually the artists stopped talking to each other. Instead, they proposed a memorial made up of two separate artworks.
SPEAKER_12: A series of bronze statues of Spanish settlers, including Oneate in full armor, and Nora's Response, an abstract land art installation made out of the desert itself. It had gone from a small bronze statue to a memorial that would take up most of a city block and cost over half a million dollars, requiring the city to issue special bonds.
SPEAKER_13: Now the question was, would the city approve it? Conchita and the pro-Oneate forces lobbied the city council, while Oneate opponents, like Tweedy, took their case to the people.
SPEAKER_06: You know, finding out, well, who's for us and who isn't, and how do we target the people in that area for them to call their councilmen? And that's the first time I'd ever done that, you know?
SPEAKER_12: You were like becoming an activist for the first time? Yeah, I was. I'd never done that.
SPEAKER_12: The statue, and also a highway the city was trying to build through a national monument of ancient petroglyphs, was making first-time activists out of a lot of Pueblo people. It's the first time that we really rallied around something.
SPEAKER_12: Activists, artists, citizens, and city councilors were headed for a final showdown.
SPEAKER_05: This is GOV 14, and now from Government Center in downtown Albuquerque, the Albuquerque City Council.
SPEAKER_13: In a series of meetings, the city council auditorium was divided, like a pep rally, or Congress. On one side was the pro-Oneate crowd, mostly Hispanic people around Conchita's age. On the other side was the anti-Oneate group. They tended to be younger and more diverse, Native Americans, but also Anglos and African Americans. And a lot of people who identified as Chicano or Mestizo, explicitly embracing their indigenous as well as European ancestry.
SPEAKER_12: The city council tried to give the two sides equal time to speak. And in hour after hour of public comment, they went back and forth. But not over the design of the memorial, really. They were fighting over something much bigger, and much more personal. Their place in American history.
SPEAKER_03: Our colony was the first in what is today the United States of America. You can't pretend that we didn't come here 400 years ago. This is really a matter of denigrating the Hispanic people of New Mexico.
SPEAKER_10: Ah, do I have to stop? Oh no, no, no. Have some courage and listen. First of all, soy Chicano.
SPEAKER_09: And unlike some Hispanics that are here in the audience, I didn't just get off the plane from Spain.
SPEAKER_00: Oneate does not represent the best of my culture. You are not representing me. And I just want to say that I'm sorry that you and a small group of Hispanics in this room feel like they have to slam another people's culture in order to feel pride. Applause
SPEAKER_13: There were dozens of speakers, but the leaders were women from Acoma, like Tweety.
SPEAKER_08: I didn't know that the awful things that happened to my people, happened to my people. Until this statue became an issue.
SPEAKER_07: I'm really tired of being used as tourists. And our wares are the only things that matter in this community. I'm begging you. Don't do this to my people. I'm begging you, don't do this to my people. Don't hurt them this way. It's not right.
SPEAKER_08: Thank you very much. Last speaker, I.L. Sanchez Davis.
SPEAKER_12: It seemed like most people were on Tweety's side. But if the city voted against the memorial, it wouldn't just be saying no to this statue of Oneate and the settlers, and to Nora's landscape art. It would be admitting that this whole very public process that had dragged on for more than two years had been a failure. The committees, the design iterations, the debate, all for nothing. So when it finally came time to vote, All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed, no. They voted 7-2 to build the memorial. That motion passes. After the vote, Conchita Lucero told a reporter, I think our kids will finally learn about their ancestors. Tweety Suazo and other anti-Oneate activists formed a prayer circle in the city council chambers and wept.
SPEAKER_06: We worked so hard. And it just, it didn't matter. It didn't matter what we said. It didn't matter what we do. It didn't matter that we educated. It just didn't matter.
SPEAKER_12: If it all happened again today, do you think it would happen the same way? No. What would be different?
SPEAKER_06: I think Pueblos are just a little bit more politically astute now.
SPEAKER_12: Tweety thinks what they learned was that the right arguments aren't enough. You need the right decision makers. She's one of several anti-Oneate activists who went on to get involved in electoral politics. She's now the chair of the Native American Democratic Caucus of New Mexico. And this last cycle, she helped raise money and get out the vote for Deb Haaland, one of the two Native American women who just became the first ever to be elected to Congress.
SPEAKER_13: Today, if you go visit the Finnish memorial, what you'll see isn't Oneate on a horse. It's a compromise. It's really two memorials crammed into one. The first you can grasp without even getting out of your car.
SPEAKER_12: It's more than two dozen life-sized bronze figures, men and women, oxen and sheep, trudging up a hill. Juan de Oneate is in front. On foot, no plaque with his name, and under the watchful eye of a security camera that may or may not be pointed at his feet. The second memorial, right next to it, looks from above like a huge dirt spiral.
SPEAKER_13: But from ground level, you really just have to experience it.
SPEAKER_12: It's a striking contrast to the kind of art that's really in your face and didactic and says, this is what I mean.
SPEAKER_05: I think that reflects Pueblo thinking. It's much more subtle. It doesn't articulate in the way we've become used to as, you know, civilized people, colonized people.
SPEAKER_12: When I met Nora Naranjo-Morris to get a tour, she'd just been picking up trash left inside her part of the memorial. She was holding a donut wrapper as we walked down a dirt path that spirals slowly downhill into the ground. The street disappears behind the berms of chimesas and junipers on our right and left, then the buildings, then Oneate himself. Until finally, at the center of the spiral, all you can see is the land. Water trickling across a rock.
SPEAKER_05: And I like that very much because I think that's what it was like a long time ago. That's how I interpret the past.
SPEAKER_12: If you sit low to the ground, you can almost get a glimpse of a world before Oneate arrived. It's an escape. But it's also intended as a confrontation between two totally different worldviews. Because as you walk back out of the spiral. This is what you see.
SPEAKER_05: The telephone lines, the sculpture of Oneate coming here, looking north. The stoplight, it's all there. And so you see that in some ways when they came, they brought us great opportunity, but at such a high cost. The brutal colonization was forever affecting to us. And I think we should never forget that.
SPEAKER_12: She hopes her piece of the memorial will remind people of that. But honestly, not that many people come here. The memorial doesn't attract nearly as much attention as the conflict over the memorial did. I think that's why it's important stewardship, not only to pick up the trash, but also to keep that story alive.
SPEAKER_05: Because there are going to be a lot more generations of people coming, wondering what is this.
SPEAKER_13: And that's where our story was going to end. Until last year, when an old mystery re-emerged. Remember that first statue we told you about? The one that got its foot stolen? Well, for almost two decades, the foot thieves had remained in the shadows, their identities unknown. And then one day, Chris Eyre, the director of Smoke Signals and Skins, possibly the best known Native American filmmaker, was at La Chosa, this great little New Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe.
SPEAKER_14: I was sitting there eating a taco with my business partner, and someone came up to me and said, I have a story to tell you as I'm eating my taco. And I said, oh shit, not another story. And, you know, I heard a few key words, but I wasn't listening that intently. And all of a sudden it dawned on me, I said, wait a minute. And I turned and I said, are you talking about what I think you're talking about?
SPEAKER_12: It was the guy who cut the foot off the first Oneate statue.
SPEAKER_13: Or at least he claimed to be a spokesman for the group who did the deed. And the truth of the matter is that I could never verify it other than I believed it in the end.
SPEAKER_14: Chris believed the guy, in part because he was presented with a very solid piece of evidence.
SPEAKER_13: When Chris met him for a second time in a forest of piñon trees, he unwrapped a piece of black velvet to reveal something no one had seen for 20 years.
SPEAKER_12: Lo and behold, there appeared probably a 28 inch long bronze patinaed boot of a Spanish conquistador.
SPEAKER_14: And I said to myself, wow. Then I looked around and I said to myself, where the hell am I and what the hell am I doing here? A few chunks of the foot had been shaved off, where they'd made a half-hearted attempt to follow through on those medallions for the historically ignorant.
SPEAKER_12: But otherwise, it was still intact and still had the power to grab people's attention. If Chris knows the identity of the foot thieves, he is not revealing it. But he did talk about their motivations.
SPEAKER_13: You know, the party involved is not speaking from an activist position and doesn't feel like an activist. This person feels like a historian.
SPEAKER_12: He wasn't trying to start a movement or effect policy just to write what Oneate did to Acoma men in 1599 into the history of the colonization of New Mexico.
SPEAKER_13: That story still doesn't have a statue, and maybe it never will. But in the meantime, the friends of Acoma are holding on to Oneate's foot. Most statues in the news these days are Confederate ones. We're going to talk to a journalist who's researched exactly how those monuments are funded. That's coming up after this. USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides long-term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence, and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day, displaced families struggle to meet basic needs, like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many, the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19 formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. UNHCR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large-scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance, help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life-saving care and hope for a better future. Donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org slash donation. What's more important? Making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time. With annuity and life insurance solutions from Lincoln Financial, you're not just taking care of you and your family's future. You're also helping yourself out today. Lincoln's annuities offer options to not only provide you with your guaranteed retirement income for life, but to help protect you from everyday market volatility. And their life insurance policies not only provide your family with a death benefit, but some can even give you immediate access to funds in case of an emergency. Go to LincolnFinancial.com slash get started now to learn how to plan, protect and retire. Lincoln annuities and life insurance are issued by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana. The annuities sold in New York are issued by Lincoln Life and Annuity Company of New York, Syracuse, New York, distributed by Lincoln Financial Distributors, Inc., a broker dealer.
SPEAKER_13: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a warning. And switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp dot com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. Our story about Onate this week was a collaboration with Reveal, which, if you're not already a fan, is a podcast from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. And Reveal is actually airing another fascinating statue story this coming weekend. It comes out on Saturday and we want you to subscribe and listen to the whole thing. So we're going to talk with one of the reporters involved to give you a little preview. The story focuses on Confederate monuments, and it was reported by Seth Friedwessler and Brian Palmer of the Investigative Fund. And for Brian, his interest in Confederate monuments all started in a historic cemetery. He was visiting the place where his great grandparents were buried. They were both enslaved and then self emancipated to the north. Brian's great grandfather served in the United States Army during the Civil War. And the cemetery where they're buried is located in Virginia on a military base. There's a white section and a black section. And what I saw was, on the one hand, tragic and on the other hand, enlightening.
SPEAKER_15: The tragic part was that this African-American cemetery was not as well tended as the white cemetery across the base. So that to me was a little bit striking. At the white cemetery there was one grave in particular that caught my eye. It had a couple of Confederate flags around it and the inscription on this wooden cross, a little plaque said, to the unknown Confederate soldier. So I thought, wow, that's really interesting. This white cemetery is being maintained. The black cemetery they at least raked, but it was tumbled down and it just did not look like it had had any stewardship. So I started wondering, well, why are such cemeteries, black cemeteries, historic black cemeteries, why are cemeteries such as this in such terrible shape? And why are Confederate cemeteries and monuments and sites in such wonderful shape? So the obvious journalist thing to do then is to follow the money. So you notice that there's a disparity in the care and it makes you realize that that disparity in care is reflected in disparity of dollars.
SPEAKER_13: And that money is being spent on Confederate monuments and not being spent on the monuments devoted to the African-American experience and the African-American history. And then you start chasing down the dollars and not only are those dollars being used for the preservation and the maintenance of Confederate monuments, they are being used for Confederate monuments devoted to this lost cause narrative. So could you describe what the lost cause narrative is to people who don't know it? Yes. So you make that important distinction.
SPEAKER_15: We looked at a range of sites that tell Civil War history. You have battlefields, you have homes and all sorts of different places. And what they put on the walls and what their guides say is factual. This happened here, this unit fought. That to us is history. That's acceptable, that is educational, that's perfect. What we did was we focused on sites where the historic historical interpretation and what the people there say and what is omitted represents an ideology, not an evidence-based comprehensive approach to the Civil War, but what represents ideology, what perpetuates ideology. So for example, ones that either minimize or deny the centrality, the importance of slavery in the Civil War, the ones that pump out these loyal slave, happy slave myths, and ones that deny any southern responsibility for the war. They paint this picture of blamelessness. This to us is corrosive to democracy and to our society, and I think it's led us to where we are now politically, in fact.
SPEAKER_13: So these monuments that you were investigating, they didn't appear right after the Civil War. So could you talk about when they showed up and what political purpose they were serving when they were erected? They didn't just spring up after the Civil War, largely because the South didn't have the money to erect them.
SPEAKER_15: Our first major monument here in Virginia was donated by Brits. Thomas Stonewall Jackson was put on the lawn of our Capitol, and that was funded by British folks. But monument building really had three main phases at the tail end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century, and then right around the time of civil rights. So interesting, huh? It's not coincidental.
SPEAKER_13: And so each of these things, they came about over time in these moments of white people in power really literally exhibiting their dominance through these statues and monuments. And what I think is really interesting, you make this really good point in the piece, is that the current discussion or controversy over historic monuments, this isn't current PC culture kind of thing. There was objections all the way along. It's just people didn't listen, because they were mainly objections by African Americans.
SPEAKER_15: There is a history of African American resistance to this sort of self-glorification of white elites. Frederick Douglass wrote about monuments, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the monuments, and they were saying, you know, this is just ridiculous. And yet, because blacks didn't have the political power to do anything, and because the so-called mainstream media controlled by white men did not write about these objections, it could find no traction in larger culture. So people now in the 21st century can, with ignorance, tell us, well, you never objected before. No, it's that you never paid attention before, and we never had the tools to make you pay attention in the same way that you forced us to pay attention to your myths and your stories by embedding them in public space.
SPEAKER_13: So you began investigating these Lost Cause memorials. How did you go about investigating how public funds were used to maintain and promote these sort of ahistoric sites?
SPEAKER_15: So how did we go about this? First, we had to differentiate between the sites that were doing real, honest, genuine historic work, and those that were promoting ideology. So we did a lot of our searching on the web first, and we talked to people in the places where these monuments and sites were, and then we went so we could go to the museum, so we could go to the gift shop, so we could talk to the docents. So we visited 50, 60 different places, and we lost count. And then, once we figured out which sites we wanted to focus on, we filed dozens of open records and Freedom of Information Act requests to local and state governments and to the federal government to find out where this money was coming from. We looked at IRS documents. We looked at state budgets line by line by line. So that was our methodology.
SPEAKER_13: And so could you tell me, just like, you're going around to these sites with your collaborator Seth Fried-Wessler, and Seth is white, correct? Seth is white. I am not. I am African American, yes.
SPEAKER_13: Were you ever separated in such a way that you were given a different experience of these sites? So that's a very interesting question, because we tended to report separately.
SPEAKER_15: I knew, based on my reporting with other white colleagues and with my wife, who's white, that we would be treated differently. So the stuff that Seth heard and the stuff that I heard, very different. And I think that's part of the story, but it's also the frame of the story.
SPEAKER_15: We went to some of the same places, like the Confederate section of Oakwood Cemetery here. I spend a lot of time there. Seth visited. What people told him was alarming. What people told me was supposed to be reassuring. They needed to get the PR engine going for the visiting black person, but for a white person, they could be themselves, as it were. They could let their prejudiced hair hang down. And that, to me, was telling. There are people who just don't know the other part of this history, the African American strands that have been purposely erased. But then there are people who do know, and still they trot out these myths, either to preserve their power, to make themselves feel better. Whatever it is, that's a kind of intellectual dishonesty that I think is really, really dangerous. And I think that's... we're trying to drain that swamp. We are trying to eliminate the gray area that people can wallow around in when they say, well, this is heritage and they've been standing for a hundred years, and if the black people want their own monuments, then they should go build them. Well, a lot of these monuments were built with public funds. Yes, there were private donations, certainly, but land was donated, infrastructure was built, and money. And allocations came from general assemblies, city councils, county supervisors. So don't tell me that we should accept sites and statues that were erected in a violent and anti-democratic atmosphere when African Americans were being lynched. African Americans could not participate in the political process that put these things up. Now that we can, we're supposed to shut up? We have no time for fake history. And this is fake history. We need to illuminate, not obfuscate.
SPEAKER_13: To hear Brian Palmer and Seth Fried-Wessler's full story on public funding for Confederate monuments, subscribe to Reveal. There is amazing and jaw-dropping tape in the story from some of their visits to memorials like Beauvoir, which is Jefferson Davis' home and presidential library in Biloxi, Mississippi. And Brian and Seth also do the important work of chasing down how much public money, taxpayer money, our money, is being spent to maintain these sites. Check it out at RevealNews.org or wherever you listen to podcasts. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Stan Alcorn and edited by Delaney Hall. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousuf. Music by Sean Rial. Our senior producer is Katie Mingle. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Avery Troughman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lee, Joe Rosenberg, Taryn Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, our collaborators on the story this week. Thanks also to Roman Garcia at KUNM and the filmmaker Chris Eyre. He interviewed the alleged foot thieves for his film that is currently seeking funding. So you should seek him out and give him some. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.
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