There’s been a lot of conversation over the past few years about monuments, specifically ones dedicated to Confederate leaders, and whether they should stay up or be taken down. But, Cynthia Prescott, a history professor at the University of North Dakota, has been looking into a different kind of monument — although in some ways, they’re just as controversial.
Prescott has studied pioneer monuments, including those in Arizona. She defines these as sculptures in the public sphere that depict early white settlers in the American West. And that, she says, also ends up in discussions about how Indigenous peoples are portrayed, as well.
Prescott joined The Show to discuss whether she found pioneer monuments to be part of the same conversation as other kinds of monuments being problematic, or potentially coming down.
Full conversation
CYNTHIA PRESCOTT: A lot of people have talked about Confederate monuments in particular, as being monuments that were put up in the late 19th, early 20th centuries for the purpose of enshrining a racial hierarchy. And through my work, I argue that Western pioneer monuments were doing very similar cultural work.
They were all those that were put up in that time period, and there are dozens of them. They also were intended to reinforce white supremacy over peoples of color. And they, in particular, were addressing so-called white civilization in contrast to native quote unquote savagery, and seeing whites as being superior to the indigenous peoples they were displacing in the American West.
MARK BRODIE: It's an interesting point because I think for a lot of these monuments that you described, they're talking about pioneers, people who quote unquote settled this area, when in fact, in many of these places, there were already people living there.
PRESCOTT: That's right. And the people who put up these monuments in, at the turn of the 20th century were very aware of that, right? And as the U.S. West moved from warfare to remove Native peoples toward really establishing white settlements in the West, they start trying to sort of reinforce their social stature in relation to native people through their public art.

BRODIE: Is it the art itself that seems problematic, like maybe the, the people who are depicted or the ways in which people are depicted, or maybe is it a little more subtle than that in terms of what, what folks find problematic?
PRESCOTT: There are several examples in other states in the American West where the visual representation of Native people in relation to whites is pretty explicitly problematic. So for example, there was one in San Francisco that depicted a Spanish missionary towering over a seated Native man who seems to be in a very submissive position. And that image was very problematic to a number of people, and the city chose to remove that portion of that monument in 2018.
In Arizona, I am not aware of any monuments that are that explicit in their racial framings. But there are monuments that, I think, do this work more subtly. In more recent monuments, I think the artist's intent was to be respectful to Indigenous people. But in some cases, you can see cultural biases coming through if you read them carefully enough.
So, to give you examples of what that looks like, Arizona's first pioneer monument was put up in the 1920s by the Daughters of the American Revolution, and after some debate about the best location, they chose to place it in Springerville, Arizona. And it's one of 12 identical statues across the country that portray white women carrying civilization westward.
She's carrying a baby in her arms and a rifle in her hand. She has a young boy clinging to her skirts as she marches westward carrying white civilization. There's no Native person depicted visually in the statue. But the cultural expectation at that time was that this represented white civilization coming to a supposedly savage frontier.
In contrast, a statue put up in 1990 outside Prescott, Arizona, known as Spirit of the Frontier, depicted a pioneer woman and her young son, quite similar to the one in Springerville from the 1920s. Bt the one outside Prescott from 1990 depicts that pioneer mother figure standing next to a Yavapai woman who holds a baby in a cradleboard in her arms. The artist's intention, as best I've been able to uncover from written records, indicates that she really intended this to be a positive depiction of both white settlers and the Yavapai people who were Indigenous to the area around Prescott.
However, if you look closely, you notice that the, again, the pioneer mother is gazing forward, kind of preparing to, to move forward into the future. She and her young son, and there's a, a wagon wheel behind them, again, reinforcing this notion of progress and moving forward, moving westward. In contrast, the Yavapai woman is, is depicted gazing downward at the baby in her arms, which makes her look less engaged in the future.
BRODIE: Well, so how much can we safely read into an artist's intention, do you think? I mean, you mentioned that you had, you know, there's some written records at the time, but I guess, especially, you know, for some of the, the earlier monuments that were put up or maybe the record isn't quite as robust as what it would be in, in more recent decades. How much do you think we can safely read into what an artist was trying to get at?
PRESCOTT: Well, in some cases we do have the artists’ stated written documentation on what they, they intended. We can also look at the body of their work, the artist of the, the Spirit of the Frontier statue depicted a number of, created another a number of other statues that depicted Indigenous people in fairly positive ways. So that's I, I think she, my sense is that what she was intending was for this to be positive.
When we don't have as much documentation on what the artist intended, we have to look at other places. So in some cases we're looking at, how does this statue compare to other statues, right? In the case of the Madonna of the Trail in Springerville, we know a fair bit about what the donors intended with that, that statue. We have some documentation of that, and we can also see that this visual trope of the woman in the sunbonnets striding westward appeared across the country at this time, and we can look at what people were saying if we don't have information about a given statue, if you've got similar imagery helping happening in other places and can get at that artist's intention, or what the people were saying at the time it was at its dedication, something along those lines, then we can start thinking about, OK, here's what the larger community conversation is surrounding these monuments.
BRODIE: Well, so we started the conversation by talking about the, the controversy over monuments and of course over the last number of years. Several have been taken down, specifically that relate to, for example, the Civil War, Confederate soldiers, you know, people like that. Do you get the sense that there's any conversation or desire to remove any of these pioneer monuments in Arizona or other parts of the West? Maybe for similar reasons as people wanted to get rid of the Confederate monuments, maybe for different reasons, but is that part of the conversation?
PRESCOTT: There actually has been, there have been cases of attacks or vandalism against statues of Spanish priests who were involved in colonization and of Arizona. The Spirit of the Frontier statue in Prescott, Arizona, that depicts a pioneer mother and a Yavapai mother side by side, was put up on what is actually Yavapai land. It was a shopping center right on, on the outskirts of the town of Prescott on, on Yavapai reservation lands.
In 1990, a little over a decade later, the Yavapai Prescott Tribe purchased back that, that shopping center from white developers, and shortly after that transaction was finalized, that statue was removed from the shopping center. And that suggests to me that at least some within the Yavapai community did not really want to have that image put forward on their land any longer.