The problem with The Pioneer statue

A photo of The Pioneer statue where it stood, and another photo of it toppled

On June 13, 2020, The Pioneer and The Pioneer Mother statues on the University of Oregon campus were toppled by demonstrators. The Pioneer, a figure of a bearded white man carrying a whip and a rifle, was installed on campus in 1919. On the one hundredth anniversary of the statue’s installation, members of the UO’s Native American Student Union demanded that The Pioneer be removed due to its symbolism of violence perpetrated by settlers toward the Native American people of Oregon. The UO Administration did not act upon their demand.

Marc Carpenter, a PhD candidate in History and a 2019-20 OHC Dissertation Fellow, writes about pioneer violence against Native Americans in early Oregon. “My research demonstrates that white supremacist violence seen in The Pioneer statue by Native students today was part of the artist’s original intent. The sculptor, Alexander Phimister Proctor, saw ‘Indian killing’ as a constituent part of being a ‘typical frontiersman,’ and seems to have formed his idea of an ‘ideal pioneer’ in part from an early encounter with a notorious Indian killer named Big Frank. Like many other Euro-Americans of his day, Proctor saw Native people as inherently violent, and the pioneers who had killed them as heroes. Moreover, sources from the University of Oregon at the time suggest that Proctor’s intent to celebrate pioneer violence would have been clear to the students and community members gathered at the statue’s unveiling in 1919.”

Carpenter’s dissertation advisor, Jeffrey Ostler, is the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History in the Department of History. He specializes in the history of the American West, with a particular focus on American Indian history. “Marc Carpenter’s dissertation promises to make a major contribution to our understanding of the violent history that created Oregon.”

Carpenter gave an OHC Work-in-Progress talk “Memory and Erasure of Settler Violence in Early Oregon, 1848-1928” via Zoom on May 29, 2020. The recording of his talk can be accessed at: https://youtu.be/PBtafLDsJuo

“My Oregon Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship allowed me the time and space to bring together and write up my research on pioneer violence and colonial genocide in Oregon. I will always be thankful for the help during a critical time, and grateful for the opportunity to share my work with a broader audience.”

Here are links to Carpenter’s writing and comments about The Pioneer statue:

Carpenter’s short article on the issue, “‘Two Sides of the Same Story’: Colonial Violence and Erasure in the University of Oregon’s (Fallen) Pioneer Statues,” will appear in the September 2020 issue of the Center for the Study of Women in Society Annual Review.