Two controversial statues that came down during racial justice protests in downtown Denver in the summer of 2020 won’t return to their pedestals.
The fraught tributes to European colonizers will stay in storage until the community gets a chance to weigh in on what to do with them. At the same time, the city is embarking on a $500,000 survey of the remaining works displayed in Civic Center park and will move forward on plans to overhaul the park’s Greek Amphitheatre to make it accessible to all.
“I really hope that through this audit we will potentially uncover histories from the works and Civic Center park that we did not know before,” said Tariana Navas-Nieves, director of cultural affairs for Denver Arts & Venues. “I don’t know if there will be any future decisions about renaming, or reframing, or leaving as they are. … And I think, broader than that, we really want to explore what commemoration means.”
The statues had been the subjects of public debate for years.
City crews removed the likeness of fur trapper and solider Kit Carson from the top of Pioneer Monument, the large fountain at Colfax and Broadway, on June 26, 2020, a day after demonstrators pulled a large sculpture commemorating Christopher Columbus from its plinth in Civic Center park and toppled a Civil War monument on the statehouse grounds a block away.
When the tribute to Kit Carson was removed, a city spokesperson said it was “done proactively for safety” amid protests against police brutality and racial injustices. Carson worked with Native people, but also carried out orders in the 1860s to kill members of the Navajo, Apache, Kiowa and Comanche tribes and led the forced removal of Navajo and Apache from their homelands in Arizona and New Mexico. The Colorado Geographic Renaming Advisory Board is in the process of removing his name from a southern Colorado fourteener.
The city had considered different plans for the Columbus-dedicated, Vitruvian Man-style statue, as reported in December by ICT, a national news outlet focused on coverage of Indigenous communities.
In October, city officials spoke to tribal historic preservation officers, delegates and elders from tribal nations that have historically called this area home during an event called Denver in Context: Tribal Nations Community Gathering. The city officials presented the option of reinstalling the statue under a different name. The bronze sculpture, originally titled, “Man of All Nations,” was donated to Denver by the Adamo family in 1970 to acknowledge Colorado for being the first state to recognize Columbus Day as an official holiday. Yet the artist’s son has said it was never his father’s intention for the sculpture to represent Columbus.
Groups including the American Indian Movement of Colorado had, for decades, advocated for the removal of a plaque on the statue’s stand describing Columbus as an “Italian visionary and great navigator.”
The meeting was difficult and Navas-Nieves said the feedback she received was that renaming and reinstating the statue was not something participants supported.
“I recognize that there is a lot of pain, and I acknowledge the pain caused by these pieces, which are symbols of European colonizers,” Navas-Nieves said. “At the same time, I thought it was important that they were aware of what was considered.”
“Incredibly disrespectful to have to continually explain” the problems with Columbus
Donna Chrisjohn, who is Sicangu Lakota and an Indigenous education consultant, was co-chair of the Denver American Indian Commission when both statues came down in 2020.
“It’s been a matter of protest and a matter of contention for as long as I’ve been in Denver,” she said of the statue that’s come to be associated with Columbus. “The community requests for accountability that were happening here in Denver and across the country concerning racial reckoning and justice, and all of these monuments came up again.”
She felt the city asking tribal representatives and elders about the possibility of reinstalling the statue was “alarming,” and said many felt blindsided by the conversation.
Raven Payment, who is Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka and the current co-chair of the commission, agreed.
“It’s incredibly disrespectful and insulting for the Native community to have to continually explain why the connotations behind Christopher Columbus, regardless of what this bust actually is, (are harmful),” she said. “I hope I don’t have to continue to argue that Columbus did terrible things to other human beings on this planet.”
Several commissioners told The Colorado Sun that DAIC sent a letter to the city about the statues in 2021. Kristina Maldonado Bad Hand, a Sicangu Lakota and Cherokee artist, was co-chair of the commission at the time they sent the letter and said some commissioners were open to the Vitruvian Man-style statue finding a future home elsewhere.
“I believe those of us that were fine with it being installed under the name the artist originally intended were still advocating that it be somewhere else, not in that park, in a public-facing space like that,” she said.
If it were to return to the park, even under a different name, it would still hold this representation of what it’s been known as the past several decades in that space and “would not be justice” for those who protested and brought the statue down nearly four years ago, Maldonado Bad Hand said.
“We hope that the removal is a first step towards healing and, while the work is not a likeness, we recognize that that piece has represented the figure Columbus for so long that it has become a symbol of that,” Navas-Nieves said.
With the decision made, Navas-Nieves said she’s been reaching out to those with ties to the sculpture to let them know it won’t return to public view at the park and that the city is “committed to celebrating all, including the Italian community.”
“We’re hoping that we can find a way to recognize the Adamos family’s love of Denver and their generosity in a way that does not exalt a violent history of colonial oppression,” she said.
The city’s decision to permanently remove the piece from Civic Center park is “bittersweet” for Payment.
“Yay, we’re not doing the statue, but also you really hurt our community. And not reinstalling the statute was kind of the bare minimum,” she said, adding that she’d like to see a formal apology from the city to the commission and the tribal representatives they met with in October.
Navas-Nieves said she plans to attend the commission’s April meeting to speak with members about the statues and take their questions.
In the meantime, she said in an email, the city has acknowledges “the pain caused by these pieces, symbols of European colonizers that exploited the lands and peoples in the Americas, and the destructive effects of the colonial era passed down through generations still felt today. We have heard about the pain caused by these statues from the American Indian community and we hope their permanent removal is a first step towards healing.”
Other plans for Civic Center and its monuments
The city is also in the process of putting together a request for bids to hire a consultant to lead an audit of the monument collection in Civic Center. Navas-Nieves hopes the RFQ will be posted this month.
The audit is part of a larger city project, for which Denver’s Arts & Venues and Parks and Recreation departments received $2.3 million in grant funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2020, the foundation announced a multi-year initiative called The Monuments Project, devoted to reimagining monuments to reflect a fuller and more accurate vision of American history and stories. Last fall, it doubled its original financial commitment to $500 million to study already existing monuments and create new ones across the U.S.
According to Navas-Nieves, $500,000 of the Mellon Foundation grant to Denver was earmarked for the audit. This will include conducting research into the histories of the different pieces in the park. Navas-Nieves also hopes to document the process because “processes are as important as the decisions.” That might include interviews with descendants of artists and families of donors.
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With the remaining Mellon Foundation funds, the city is planning a site within the South Plaza of the park to honor the Gang of 19, a group of 19 activists who used wheelchairs. In 1978, they held up two Denver city buses for 24 hours while chanting “we will ride,” a demand for accessible transit. They would eventually launch a national fight, which in the 1980s, led to the founding of the powerhouse advocacy group known today as American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, or ADAPT.
Jenna Harris, the Downtown Parks Program manager, said she’s reluctant to use the term “monument” when talking about the planned Gang of 19 site.
“I like to reframe the conversation around commemoration because part of what we pitched to the Monuments Project is really thinking about a different version of what a monument can be,” Harris told The Colorado Sun. “Rather than an object, we’re really thinking about it more as a place or an experience, especially within the context of a park, that could be filled with life and people that isn’t just about a singular object.”
The Gang of 19 site is part of a larger renovation project of the park, which includes making the Greek Amphitheater along West 14th Avenue Parkway accessible for the first time in its 100-plus-year history. The broader effort is also funded by $4 million from the Elevate Denver Bond Program and money from the Parks and Recreation capital fund, Harris said.
Denver has selected a design team for the major revamp of the historic park. Harris said Studio Gang, headquartered in Chicago, has been named the lead architects with design studio Olin as the lead landscape architects and Denver-based firms studiotrope and Mundus Bishop as local collaborators.
What comes next for the removed statues
Now that they won’t return to their former locations, the Kit Carson and Columbus statues will, for now, stay in city storage, said Navas-Nieves. She anticipated that ongoing community engagement will inform decisions about their fates.
Chrisjohn thinks it’s critical to involve the community on this topic, and wondered if there’s a way to transform these marble, stone or bronze statues into “something that can help us remember what we’ve been through as a people, as a country, and that we are capable of change and capable of getting on the other side of harm.”
“But I think it’s up to our community to make that decision,” she said. “I’m not just talking about the Native community, I’m talking about the Denver community at large. Leaving it up to the Denver community to make that decision would be remarkable.”
Moving forward, Payment said she’d like to see all city departments be more proactive in engaging with Indigenous communities and seeking Native perspectives across the board.
“One of the things I’ve been speaking a lot about lately is Native representation in all spaces,” she said. “I feel like a lot of times our opinions are only solicited if it’s something Native-specific, like we had a Kit Carson statue here so we should talk to you, without ever understanding that we’re a part of the entire community as a whole.”