Toppled Civil War Statue in Colorado to Be Replaced With Native American Woman Memorial
To commemorate the 1864 Sand Creek massacre.
Over the summer, Black Lives Matter protestors toppled a Civil War memorial in Denver, Colorado. State representatives have recently voted to replace the statue with a sculpture of a Native American woman in mourning. The statue will commemorate the 1864 Sand Creek massacre where U.S. army soldiers destroyed and pillaged a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in southeastern Colorado, as per CPR News.
The Capitol Building Advisory Committee voted 7-2 to build the replacement monument after hearing from descendants of the hundreds that were killed at Sand Creek. “They were wiped out,” Otto Braided Hair, of the Northern Cheyenne, told the committee. “Their voices are no longer heard. Their wishes and concerns were no longer heard. Those are the people we speak for.”
The original statue at the Capitol was torn down during the June 25 protest and had been erected in 1909 as an homage to Colorado solders who fought for the Union during the Civil War. However, the memorial included the name of the colonel who orchestrated the massacre, CBS4 reported. The statue is now being housed at the History Colorado Center.
Artist Harvey Pratt, a Sand Creek descendant, was commissioned to create the statue by the organization One Earth Future. A seven-inch prototype of Pratt’s design has recently been completed and the state legislature will now vote on the scale of the finished work alongside its pedestal.
