Activists topple pioneer statues on University of Oregon campus

Activists on Saturday night toppled two pioneer statues on the University of Oregon campus that had been a flash point of controversy.

The Pioneer and The Pioneer Mother statues were knocked off their pedestals by a small group of protesters. The 13-foot-tall Pioneer, commonly known as the Pioneer Father, then was dragged to the steps of Johnson Hall, the main administration building on campus.

A video provided to The Register-Guard shows protesters using what looks like sledge hammers on the Pioneer Mother base after the statue was knocked over. The letters and plaques on the statue’s base were partially removed.

As of Sunday morning, the statues were gone from public view and no group had claimed responsibility for their destruction.

The university issued a statement late Saturday night:

“These are obviously turbulent times. While we support peaceful protest and vigorous expression of ideas, we do not condone acts of vandalism. Our country, state and campus are coming to terms with historic and pervasive racism that we must address, but it is unfortunate that someone chose to deface and tear down these statues. Decisions about the future of the Pioneer statues and other monuments should be made by the campus community through an inclusive and deliberative process, not a unilateral act of destruction. ...”

The University of Oregon Police Department has not responded to questions about how it is addressing the incident.

By Sunday afternoon, the steps of Johnson Hall were roped off by police tape. Across 13th Avenue, a short note written on cardboard sat in place of the Pioneer Father on the pedestal. It said, “Reminder: You are a guest on Kalapuya land,” referring to the Native American tribe indigenous to the Willamette Valley.

The Pioneer Mother was removed from where it was left by protesters. In its place was a caution cone.

Visitors drifted in and out of the area Saturday night and into Sunday, many taking pictures, some musing what the destruction achieved and others rejoicing.

The vandalism of the pioneer statues coincides with the national protest movement, which has erupted in the wake of George Floyd's death and has rekindled a fire under the cultural tinderbox known as the American Confederacy.

In the past week, public officials, military leaders and sports executives have made moves to take down Confederate statues and ban the Confederate flag, iconography that remains inextricably linked to the Southern cause that launched the Civil War: the preservation of a way of life anchored to slavery.

While such efforts have flared in recent years, historians say the Black Lives Matter protest movement once again sweeping the nation after Floyd's death has catapulted the issue to a place of unprecedented visibility that is likely to have lasting effects. Floyd, a 46-year-old black man in Minneapolis, was pinned to the ground by officers after being accused of passing a fake $20 bill at a grocery store. In a video of the encounter, Floyd gasped for breath as officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

On the UO campus, the call to remove the statues in the past couple of years has focused on how monuments, especially the Pioneer Father and Mother statues, misrepresent or omit the Native American role in Oregon’s history.

Last spring marked the 100-year anniversary of The Pioneer’s arrival to campus. The bronze statue stood on top of a boulder and its plaque read simply, “Presented to the University of Oregon by Joseph N. Teal 1919.”

Native American students objected to the statue’s presence on campus, sparking demands to move it.

“The statue either misrepresents Oregon’s history or at least tells a very one-sided story of Oregon’s history,” Bret Gilbert, former co-director of the Native American Student Union at UO, said last year. “Whether it’s erasing it or not, it perpetuates the wide-held belief that this land was discovered and uninhabited ... and that’s not the history of this land.”

The issue of the Pioneer Father statue escalated to anonymous cases of vandalism in 2019 and protests from the student union. UO President Michael Schill said in 2019 he was aware of some concerns about the statue, but they didn’t come to the forefront until that year.

“Certainly The Pioneer statue tells the story of the state of Oregon, (and) a lot of the United States. There are statues all over the West,” Schill told The Register-Guard last year. “It’s telling a particularly positive story from the viewpoint of the dominant culture group, but what it’s not telling is the story from Native American groups that were here before them. So if you’re just walking around and you don’t know that story, you just think, ‘Oh this wonderful story about discovery of the frontier.’ And there’s some of that to this, but there’s also a darker side to it.”

This isn’t the first time UO and other area colleges have been forced to reevaluate symbols on campus.

In 2015, UO was pushed by the campus community to rename Dunn and Deady halls on campus after the Black Student Task Force submitted a list of 12 demands, the first being to “change the names of all of the KKK-related buildings on campus,” with Deady Hall coming first.

Schill recommended the Board of Trustees rename Dunn Hall in 2016, and it was later named “Unthank Hall” after DeNorval Unthank Jr., the UO’s first black graduate from the School of Architecture and Allied Arts.

But Schill announced in 2017 that he would not recommend renaming Deady Hall, the oldest building on campus, because Deady made "exceptional" historical accomplishments and the report from historians did not outweigh these. Though in the report, historians found Deady ran as a pro-slavery delegate in 1857 and “promoted restricting the right to vote to ‘pure white’ men."

That decision, too, is being revisted. The University of Oregon’s Board of Trustees will reconsider the issue of renaming Deady Hall after a board member called on his fellow trustees last week to “take a stand” to better support black students on campus.

Board member Andrew Colas spoke up about how challenging and emotionally painful the past few weeks had been since Floyd was killed, and he said he had been thinking about past decisions.

“I like to believe that I always make decisions thinking about the most positive outcomes for people of color and black people specifically and our entire community,” Colas said. “One of the decisions that I've been really regretting was allowing us not to rename Deady Hall.”

The next meeting of the Board of Trustees will focus just on the topic of Deady Hall. The meeting, held remotely because of coronavirus, is scheduled for 1 p.m. June 24. A public livestream feed will be available at trustees.uoregon.edu/meetings. Public comment can be emailed to trustees@uoregon.edu.

In the university’s Saturday statement on the toppling of statues, it pointed out, “Just this week, President Michael Schill recommended that the Board of Trustees dename Deady Hall and announced to the University Senate that he was asking a campus committee to look at whether statues or monuments on campus, including two Pioneer statues, should be removed.

“The university will put the statues in safe storage and allow that process to play out."

Register-Guard reporters Jordyn Brown and Tatiana Parafiniuk-Talesnick, photojournalist Andy Nelson, and the USA Today Network contributed to this report.