Would the Native people on whose land the statue stood be proud of this moment? Would they even care?
BY JONATHAN BALLEW JULY 25, 2020
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Aman in the costume of a vagina argued intensely with the president of Chicago’s police union, who wore a jacket with the word “ITALIA” emblazoned across it in bright red letters. Off-duty cops shouted at protesters. Two car accidents occurred nearby. Hundreds of street-racing motorcycles poured past, popping wheelies and squealing their tires. It was the night the Columbus statue came down in Chicago, and in and around Grant Park, where the statue had presided for 87 years, it was a total shitshow.
Like most statues of Columbus—who beat, raped, and enslaved Native people from the moment he landed in the Caribbean—it became a potent symbol of America’s fraught history and the systemic racism plaguing it today. In Chicago, it has sharply divided residents, especially the city’s most conservative and progressive members.
When it fell at 3:00 a.m. on Friday morning, I wanted to cheer. As a reporter who’s covered nearly every type of news event in Chicago, I’m supposed to remain neutral, neither applauding nor booing events I seek to capture. But, as an indigenous tribal member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, I didn’t shed a tear for the plight of Columbus. While there are Italian-Americans who view Columbus as a symbol of exploration and courage, to me he will always be an avatar of genocide, bloodshed, and exploitation.
The Columbus statue in Chicago’s Grant Park, which crews had wrapped in a covering to protect during demonstrations and attempts to remove it.
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Friday marked the fourth time in recent months that I had camped out near the statue after hearing rumors that it was coming down. Last week, protesters swarmed the statue, trying to topple it with two small ropes (seemingly impossible to anyone who has seen the massive monument up close). Eventually, police descended on the protesters, dispersing them with pepper spray and beating them with fists and batons. Protesters also attacked cops, with some shooting fireworks into the crowd of officers, or throwing projectiles at them. One Chicago police officer was caught on video punching an 18-year-old female protester in the face, knocking out some of her teeth.
“Fifty-two police officers got hurt defending that statue and now the mayor wants to spit in their face and take the statue down,” Chicago police union President John Catanzara said that evening to reporters in front of the Columbus statue. “It’s Columbus today, it’ll be something next month and something else the month after that. The mob cannot rule the city. The politicians are supposed to rule this city, and they are cowards.”
Demonstrations to defund the police in Chicago the day after the Columbus statue came down.
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As midnight approached on the night it came down, there was no sign the city intended to do anything. Protesters on both sides of the argument exchanged fighting words, along with some pushing and shoving, though the violence that gripped the city the week before did not come to pass. It appeared this was another false alarm. The statue, which was wrapped in a covering because of recent vandalism and attempts at removal from protesters, would remain where it was.
But, around 15 minutes after midnight, a park district truck arrived with a small hardhat crew. By 1:00 a.m. it was clear Columbus would spend his last night in Grant Park as larger vehicles and machinery showed up and police began to cordon off the park and usher the press to a special viewing area. City workers wrapped Columbus in chains, like he had done to so many Natives. The removal crew made quick work of him, all things considered, and Chicago’s press scrum waited for the moment to get the historic shot.
Crews work to remove the Columbus statue in Chicago.
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Tyrone Muhammad, executive director of Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change, watched from across the street with a group of Chicagoans eager to see the statue come down. “This is a great opportunity for our children to get some motivation about something that the city actually listened to their voices,” he told me. He lamented what he called a misallocation of resources to have so many Chicago police officers dispatched to a statue on multiple weekends. And he hoped the symbolic move would lead to “true economic” relief for Chicago communities left behind for too long.
And then—after all the waiting and protesting and violence—a sudden crack reverberated through the air. The crews had severed Columbus from his base, and he was hanging from a rope. It happened so quickly, most of the press missed the shot. With the statue suspended in mid-air, I thought about my Pokagon ancestors. I thought of the struggles they have endured for hundreds of years. I thought of the Fort Dearborn massacre, which took place just a mile or two from the site of the Columbus statue, where Potawatomi struggled to reclaim land from which they would ultimately be expelled. I wondered if they would be proud. I wondered if they would even care.
The Columbus statue hangs in the air after it was severed from its base.
DEREK R. HENKLEGetty Images
But as I saw the toppled Columbus loaded up in the back of a flat-bed truck, still wrapped up from the week before, it looked like a body covered in a white sheet on the highway after a gruesome death. And as the flat-bed drove away from what will always be Native land, I couldn’t help but smile at the symbolic expulsion of Columbus, dead and driven from land that was never his. I even let out the smallest of cheers.
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JONATHAN BALLEW is a Chicago-based freelance journalist, Marine Corps veteran, and citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians.
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