Myth, Memory, and the Limits of Inclusivity in Arizona Pioneer Monuments

From the 1890s through the 1920s, white southerners installed sculptural tributes to Confederate soldiers in prominent social spaces to reinforce white supremacy. ¹ In those same decades, communities across the United States responded to the demands of modern life by erecting monuments commemorating their early white settlers and celebrating manifest destiny. Public statues placed in growing western cities around 1900 tended to emphasize a social Darwinist progression from "primitive" American Indians to sophisticated white Anglo Americans. After World War I, as women gained the right to vote and challenged established gender norms, frontier commemorations shifted toward celebrating longsuffering pioneer mothers as embodiments of white "civilization." ² But this widely embraced memory of western history as progress from Indian "savagery" to white civilization actively erased the more dynamic ethnic history of western North America, particularly the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Much has been written about race relations in those borderlands and the social construction of race in the nineteenth century, but scholars have only begun to explore representations of ethnicity in public commemoration throughout the region, focusing primarily on Spanish colonization of New Mexico. ³

Examining public monuments erected in Arizona over the past century highlights the state's shifting ethno-religious hierarchies. Since the 1960s, Arizonans have erected pioneer-themed monuments in public parks and plazas that include a broader cast of characters than did donors in most western states, depicting Mormon settlers, feisty women, and even Indigenous people. Yet a close reading of these statues reveals the limits of the artists' and donors' attempts at inclusivity. Moreover, public reception of Arizona's pioneer monuments has changed over time. Earlier monuments have been forgotten or lost prominence, and the state's seemingly most inclusive statue reportedly has been removed by the Yavapai people since they acquired control of a shopping center constructed on tribal lands. Over the past century, the individuals and groups erecting Arizona's frontier-themed public statues and their dedicatory plaques have increasingly at least paid lip service to the state's ethnic and religious diversity. But what inclusivity means, and what it looks like in a public monument, depends on who is doing the commemorating. Several late-twentieth and earlytwenty-first-century monuments in Arizona attempt to be inclusive, but a closer analysis shows such attempts to be superficial.

Staking Pioneer (Mother) Claims in the 1920s

The earliest American frontier–themed monuments—erected from Pennsylvania to California between 1888 and 1920—celebrated strong white men conquering supposedly untamed lands and Indigenous peoples. Monuments in San Francisco, Denver, and Salt Lake City presented western history as a story of progress from supposed Indian savagery to white civilization. For example, San Francisco's 1893 Pioneer Monument celebrated California's "Spanish fantasy past," depicting European exploration, fur traders, Spanish missions, and the 1849 gold rush as stages in a progression toward Anglo American cultural dominance in California. ⁴ Others, like the Pioneer Father statue dedicated at the University of Oregon in 1919, focused on Anglo American settlers' efforts at conquering supposedly wild lands and peoples. ⁵ But these early pioneer monuments were concentrated along mid-nineteenth-century migration routes (particularly the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails), in large western cities, and to a lesser extent on college campuses. ⁶ Territories settled by Anglo Americans after the Civil War, such as the northern plains and southwestern borderlands, would not become active in commemorating their own early Anglo settlers until those communities were one or more generations removed from the frontier experience. Later than other western states, Arizonans erected their young state's first pioneer monument in 1928 as part of the Daughters of the American Revolution's (DAR) national campaign to commemorate westward migration routes and enshrine what they considered white settler women's civilizing role.

Throughout the United States during the 1920s, Anglo Americans grew more confident in their dominance over Indigenous peoples but were increasingly concerned about new public roles for women. Frontier commemoration during this period increasingly focused on an iconic white pioneer mother carrying Euro-American civilization westward, usually embodied in a...