99% Invisible - 404- Return of Oñate's Foot

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

All across the country, protestors have been tearing down old monuments. These monuments have been falling in the middle of historic protests against police brutality. Sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, these demonstrations have spread to communities, big and small, across the country and around the world. And as they've grown, the protests have become about much more than police violence. This national uprising has inspired a massive reckoning with our country's past. Suddenly, decades of inertia and foot-dragging have given way to decisive action. In 2018, we did a story about a couple of controversial monuments in New Mexico. They honored a Spanish conquistador named Juan de Oñate, who was an early settler in the region. We're revisiting that story with extensive updates about the current protests and a shooting that occurred at an Oñate demonstration in June. Return of Oñate's Foot

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. One, two, three! One, two, three! From Birmingham, Alabama to Washington, D.C., all across the country, old Confederate monuments are coming down. Many monuments to Confederate soldiers and slaveholders are being taken down either by protesters or by local officials. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Juneteenth demonstrators tore down two statues from a monument outside the Capitol building. In Richmond, Virginia, protesters toppled statues of Confederate leaders William Carter Wickham and Jefferson Davis.

Carter Wickham and Jefferson Davis. And Virginia Governor Ralph Northam ordered the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Yes, that statue has been there for a long time, but it was wrong then and it is wrong now. And it isn't just monuments to the Confederacy. Over 20 statues of Christopher Columbus have come down across the country, too, in cities like Providence, Rhode Island, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and even Columbus, Ohio. The Christopher Columbus statue, it is down. It's the latest form of protest against racial injustice. People across the country... These monuments have been falling in the middle of historic protests against police brutality.

Sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, these demonstrations have spread to communities big and small across the country and around the world. And as they've grown, the protests have become about much more than police violence. This national uprising has inspired a massive reckoning with our country's past. Suddenly, decades of inertia and foot-dragging have given way to decisive action. A few years back, we did a story about a couple of controversial monuments in New Mexico. They honored a Spanish conquistador named Juan de Añate, who was an early settler in the region. And yes, those statues have been back in the news recently, too. So we wanted to check in with Stan Alcorn, the reporter who did that original story for us.

Hey, Stan. Hey, Roman. So tell us about the protest that happened a couple of weeks ago in Albuquerque. Yeah, so on Monday, June 15th, I was sitting at my desk following this all just through videos on Twitter and live streams. And it was this scene very much like the ones we've seen play out across the country with Confederate generals and with Christopher Columbus of activists actively trying to pull down this statue of Oñate, really just with a rope around it, with a pickaxe. And at the same time, people trying to prevent them from doing it,

people who were heavily armed, people who looked like members of a militia in camouflage. So it was this really tense scene that I was seeing, and pretty quickly the thing that you might be afraid would happen in that kind of scene occurred. There were gunshots. you might be afraid would happen in that kind of scene occurred. There were gunshots.

And it was clear that somebody had been shot. And suddenly it became a very different kind of story. And what was this like for you watching this all unfold? You know, it was a really strange experience. These are statues that I have known my entire life, basically. I mean, I grew up in Albuquerque. I was following as this statue was put up. And now I'm like seeing people try to pull them down. And not only that, as an investigative reporter at Reveal, one of the things that I cover often is right-wing extremism. And I was actually finishing up a story about right-wing extremists.

And it was as if with these militia members, with the kind of things that they believe, with the threatened use of violence, it was like people from my Reveal extremism story had suddenly walked into my childhood public art story. So, it was this really strange kind of collision of worlds. Yeah. It seems like a lot of our history is all colliding at this very moment where we're reconciling with huge stories of our past and present. It's really something to witness. So, we're going to go back to that protest and the shooting and everything that happened in the last couple of weeks. But first, we wanted to replay Stan's original story, which looks at the history of Oñate's arrival in New Mexico and the enormous battle over these monuments, which started back in the 1990s. Check it out.

On January 7, 1998, an envelope landed on the desk of Larry Calloway. He was a columnist with the Albuquerque Journal. It was sort of a combination of a press release and a ransom note and a photo. A photo. The photo was a Polaroid of a cut-off riding boot with a huge Spanish spur, all in bronze. And I read the note. The note hinted that the bronze foot came from a statue of a man named Juan de Oñate seated on a horse. It was part of a monument on the side of a rural highway near where Oñate founded the first Spanish colony in New Mexico back in 1598. Larry figured this was probably a hoax. This is Stan Alcorn, a reporter with the investigative podcast Reveal.

There are collaborators on the story today. So he handed the tip off to the newsroom, and a reporter called up the visitor center at the Oñate Monument. And asked, is your statue missing a right foot? And the guy said, what? And he went out and checked, came back, and he was, you know, in shock. He said, it's gone. Oñate is one of the world's lesser-known conquistadors, but his name is all over New Mexico. There are Oñate streets, Oñate schools. For decades, there was an annual fiesta where one lucky guy would get to be Oñate,

complete with a cape and helmet. There's even a song. Viva Oñate! Viva! Viva Oñate! Viva! Viva la historia de este gran señor! In parts of New Mexico, he's treated as a kind of founding father. But history is not all song and dance and wearing capes. He was a conquistador, after all. The envelope Larry got also included an excerpt from a history book on Oñate's treatment of New Mexico's native

people. It described an incident that ended with Oñate sentencing a group of men from Acoma Pueblo to each have one foot chopped off. If the symbolism of removing the statue's foot was unclear, the note made it explicit. It said, we took the liberty of removing Oñate's right foot on behalf of our brothers and sisters at Acoma Pueblo. We will be melting this foot down and casting small medallions to be sold to those who are historically ignorant. The statue's sculptor cast a new right foot and reattached it. The medallions never turned up. But the story stuck. It got picked up by NPR and the New York Times.

I was a seventh grader in Albuquerque at the time. And what I remember is how the subject I found most boring, history, was suddenly this exciting mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Who stole Oñate's foot? And then there was the timing. 1998 was the 400th anniversary of Oñate's arrival. There were corto centenario celebrations planned all over the state. There would be theater, parades, a commemorative stamp. In a second note to the paper, the so-called Friends of Acoma wrote, we see no glory in celebrating Oñate's fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it. In other words, the point of cutting off the statue's foot was to spoil the party.

And the centerpiece of that party that got a mention in all the foot-cutting stories was a cuarto centenario memorial being planned for Albuquerque's historic center. The proposal? Another bronze statue of Juan de Oñate. This one right in the middle of New Mexico's biggest city. But with all this new attention on Oñate, the second statue wasn't going to get built without a fight. I still didn't see the storm that was coming. It was still in its infancy.

Conchita Lucero was one of the organizers of the 400th anniversary celebrations in Albuquerque and one of the most passionate advocates for a new Oñate statue. A passion that goes back to her childhood, growing up in 1950s New Mexico, knowing almost nothing about Oñate, or the state's two centuries as a Spanish colony.

When I was a child, at 10 years of age, I asked my grandmother, who was a school teacher, I was reading the American history books, I said, didn't our people do anything? You know, that's how I felt. She didn't know New Mexico history. All Conchita knew was that her Spanish ancestors had come to the state centuries before the Anglo classmates who called people like her dirty Mexicans or the Anglo teachers who kept her out of a leadership club.

And she knew that racism and ignorance of history were somehow connected. If we make you feel like the underdog, and then we take away your history and take away your knowledge, you're starting from scratch. Conversations, you don't know how to even participate. You just let the other guy put you down. participate. You just let the other guy put you down. Conchita thought if she could just search out her own European roots, it would help her fight back. None of this is uncommon in New Mexico, where people have been reaching back to their colonial roots and identifying as Spanish since the 1800s. After Conchita retired, she found a lot of like minds in local genealogical and historical societies.

She learned how to use birth and death and baptism records to trace her family tree. There was the occasional Native American ancestor, but she was most excited to find branches like the one that extended back to a Spanish captain who brought his wife and kids through the Chihuahuan desert on Oñate's 1598 expedition. She saw them as having transformed the region by bringing livestock and Catholicism and the Spanish language. You'd start finding your family members and you're going, wow, I never knew they did all of this. Did it change how you saw yourself? all of this. Did it change how you saw yourself? Yes. I never argued that one person wasn't as good as the other, but sometimes you were made to feel inferior. And at that point, that inferiority

left. And so it was that Conchita was on the Quarto Centenario committee when they met with the Albuquerque Arts Board to discuss their request for a prominent new statue of Juan de Oñate, the man they called the father of the Hispanic culture and our state. And who the Friends of Acoma accused of destroying Native people's way of life. Was what happened at Acoma brought up? No. And was it on your mind? brought up? No. And was it on your mind? No. Was it something that you knew about? I wasn't as versed in it as I have become. For people who don't know Akuma, what is that? This is Alida, or Tweedy Swazo, an Akuma woman who would become an outspoken opponent of an Oñate statue in Albuquerque. Acoma is the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States.

And it sits on a mesa 375 feet above the valley below. She actually carries a postcard of Acoma to show people when she travels. It's a village built on top of a mesa, which if you're not from the desert, it's like a huge rock pedestal. And that mesa just towers over the flat, empty plain below. All of it a hundred shades of brown, from light tan to deep rust. It's incredible. The tough thing with radio is you don't have pictures. Like, how to help people visualize it.

Because it's like no other place on earth. No, it's not. It's beautiful. it because it's like no other place on earth. No, it's not. It's beautiful. It's desert and rocks and sandstone and that's where I come from, you know. And unlike the dozens of pueblos that disappeared after the arrival of the Spanish, Acoma is still here. Each year, tens of thousands of tourists drive an hour west of Albuquerque and then take a tour bus up a steep road to the top of the mesa. So just watch yourself. Don't get too close to the edge.

If you happen to fall over the edge, this is the end of your tour, and no refunds will be given, so just keep that in mind. On top, you can see buildings made of mud and sandstone that tour guides say date back to the 1100s. If you think about it, these houses have been passed down through the same family for almost a thousand years now. So now we're going to be walking past some of the older houses right up here, folks. All along the tour, there are tables where Acoma artists sell their wares, mostly pottery. But it's not just a tourist attraction. sell their wares, mostly pottery. These pots are made from the area here, about two miles.

But it's not just a tourist attraction. There are 15 families that live up top year-round, and hundreds more like Tweedy's, who go there for special occasions. Funerals, deaths, religious, fiestas, we were always there. What did you know about the history of your people in that place? That we came from the underworld on the back of Grandmother Spider. We wandered the earth. And when we got to where Akuma was, we were told this is where we're supposed to be. That's what I knew, you know, that we've been there forever. Tweedy also knew that when the Spanish arrived, they did terrible things to her ancestors.

But she didn't know the details. But she didn't know the details. Historians know many of those details today because they were written down by the Spanish in letters and legal documents. These documents, to quote Oñate's best-known biographer, skim the surface of events and sometimes present Oñate, quote, as he wished to be seen, not as things actually were. Which makes their description of what happened at Acoma all the more shocking. After 13 of Oñate's men came looking for food and were killed, Oñate declared a war of blood and fire. In the most brutal account of the battle that followed, Oñate's soldiers killed hundreds of men, women, and children, stabbed prisoners and threw them off the mesa,

and set fires that suffocated women and children who'd taken shelter in sacred rooms known as kivas. They then rounded up 500 prisoners and put them on trial. Oñate sentenced those over 12 years old to 20 years of slavery. Those under 12, he separated from their families, giving the girls to the church and the boys to the captain who just destroyed their village. And then there's the most infamous detail in a document signed by Oñate himself. It says, the males who are over 25 years of age, I sentence to have one foot cut off. His cruelty to the innocent of Acoma was one of the 12 crimes for which Añate himself would later be tried and convicted by the Spanish crown. As punishment, he would be banished permanently from the territories of New Mexico. This is the history that Tweedy and I and many

other New Mexicans were learning for the first time as news of the stolen foot ricocheted around the state. That was the beginning of it. That was everybody's first awareness. And at the same time, we were also learning that the city of Albuquerque was planning to build this new, much more prominent statue of Oñate. He had been cast out of New Mexico forever. been cast out of New Mexico forever. And now you want to bring him back and put him on a statue? It's still mind boggling. How Oñate went from a banished conquistador to a father of New Mexico that people wanted to put on a statue is a story for another podcast. But the simple answer is he was first. The first to build a European colony in the region, even if that colony was soon abandoned. He was among the first to bring wheat and sheep

and Catholicism. And because every people needs a founding figure, Spanish New Mexico made Juan de Oñate its George Washington, even if he had been cast out forever. But it did not take long for the Albuquerque Arts Board to realize that Juan de Oñate was not everyone's idea of a founding father. They could see that another triumphant statue of him on a horse would be a bad look for the city. So by the time the foot was cut off of the old statue on the side of the highway, they made a few changes to the plan. The memorial would need to depict not just

Oñate, but also the peaceful settlers who came with him and the Native Americans who preceded and survived him. And the exact form the memorial would take would be up to a team of artists. They had a team of two, but right before the newspapers got wind of the missing foot, they decided to add a third. When Nora Naranjo-Morse got the call, she was in the place where she's most comfortable. Her studio. I mean, who would want to be here, right? In the studio with a fireplace in the rain. On the phone was the director of public art for the city of Albuquerque,

asking if she wanted to be part of a tricultural collaboration. It would be the Hispanic artist who had built the statue that had its foot stolen, an Anglo artist, and her, a Tewa Indian artist from the Santa Clara Pueblo. The call was so out of the blue. This was a public art project. I'd never done public art, really. This was with other people. I had been working solo, so I didn't really know. I was listening. And did you say yes right then, or do you remember how the phone called? I said yes. I said yes right away because I opened my mouth and I said yes. And then afterwards I thought, oh, I wonder what this is going to be like.

She'd find out when she showed up for that first meeting. In an institutional room with fluorescent lighting and a chalkboard, the other artists wheeled in a model of a statue they'd already put together. It was another triumphant statue of Juan de Oñate on a horse. And that's when they begin to talk about the granite pedestal and how I could use it. The pedestal beneath Oñate's horse's feet. Right. I felt insulted. I felt hurt. I felt marginalized. I didn't think I could do that. Although in myself, I was thinking that there was a solution, that art could tell a story that was truthful.

Nora quite literally refused to put Oñate on a pedestal, and the artists went back to the drawing board. But now Nora was in the public eye, and soon she started getting calls from other Pueblo people who wanted her to leave the project entirely in protest. I didn't do that. And when I refused, I got some, I think people were disappointed. But I realized that by me staying in the game, I would at least be able to fight for that voice that I think was so important. Not just my artistic voice, but the voice of these people

that had gone through this incredible experience that changed their culture completely. And I kept going back to those things. And I kept going back to those things. The year of the 400th anniversary, 1998, came and went, and there was still no plan for the memorial. But the city would not give up. All the attention had made the memorial a very public test of whether the state was the land of tricultural harmony that it claimed to be. And so every time the process hit an impasse,

the city just threw more time and money at it, hiring mediators and forming committees. At one point, one of those committees came up with a plan that would have restarted the whole artistic process, a plan Conchita's side couldn't tolerate. It called for a memorial without Oñate. And would focus on coexistence of Hispanics and the indigenous.

Well, then we said it wasn't our celebration. You know, it's your celebration now, it's not ours. You know, you don't get invited to a wedding, you don't start telling the bride and the groom, you should have had it this way or that way, or and that's what it was. It was our celebration.

But it was your celebration with public money in a public space that's in a city that has people of all different backgrounds. The grant was for our celebration, not for the Acoma celebration or for anybody else's. not for the Acoma celebration or for anybody else's. As far as Conchita's group was concerned, the presence of Oñate was non-negotiable, which made it hard to negotiate. In the end, there simply was no single design that everyone could agree on. In fact, eventually the artists stopped talking to each other. Instead, they proposed a memorial made up of two separate artworks,

a series of bronze statues of Spanish settlers, including Oñate in full armor, and Nora's response, an abstract land art installation made out of the desert itself. It had gone from a small bronze statue to a memorial that would take up most of a city block and cost over half a million dollars,

requiring the city to issue special bonds. Now the question was, would the city approve it? Conchita and the pro-Oñate forces lobbied the city council, while Oñate opponents, like Tweedy, took their case to the people. You know, finding out, well, who's for us and who isn't, and how do we target the people in that area for them to call their councilmen. And that's the first time I'd ever done that, you know?

You were like becoming an activist for the first time? Yeah, I was. I'd never, I'd never done that. The statue and also a highway the city was trying to build through a national monument of ancient petroglyphs, was making first-time activists out of a lot of Pueblo people. It's the first time that we really rallied around something. Activists, artists, citizens, and city councilors were headed for a final showdown.

This is GOV 14, and now from Government Center in downtown Albuquerque, the Albuquerque City Council. In a series of meetings, the City Council auditorium was divided, like a pep rally, or Congress. On one side was the pro-Oñate crowd, mostly Hispanic people around Conchita's age. On the other side was the anti-Oñate group. They tended to be younger and more diverse, Native Americans, but also Anglos and African Americans, and a lot of people who identified as Chicano or Mestizo, explicitly embracing their indigenous as well as European ancestry.

The city council tried to give the two sides equal time to speak. And in hour after hour of public comment, they went back and forth. But not over the design of the memorial, really. They were fighting over something much bigger and much more personal. Their place in American history. Our colony was the first in what is today the United States of America. You can't pretend that we didn't come here 400 years ago. This is really a matter of denigrating the Hispanic people of New Mexico. Do I have to stop? Oh, no, no, no.

Have some courage and listen. First of all, soy Chicano. And unlike some Hispanics that are here in the audience, I didn't just get off the plane from Spain. Oñata does not represent the best of my culture. You are not representing me. And I just want to say that I'm sorry that you and a small group of Hispanics in this room

feel like they have to slam another people's culture in order to feel pride. There were dozens of speakers, but the leaders were women from Acoma, like Tweedy. I didn't know that the awful things that happened to my people happened to my people until this statue became an issue. I'm really tired of being used as tourists, and our wares are the only things that matter in this community.

I'm begging you don't do this to my people I'm begging you don't do this to my people don't hurt them this way it's not right thank you very much last speaker

IL Sanchez Davis it seemed like most people were on Tweedy's side. But if the city voted against the memorial, it wouldn't just be saying no to this statue of Oñate and the settlers and to Nora's landscape art. It would be admitting that this whole very public process that had dragged on for more than two years had been a failure. The committees, the design iterations, the debate, all for nothing. So when it finally came time to vote, all those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Those opposed, no. They voted seven to two to build the memorial. That motion passes. to build the memorial.

That motion passes. After the vote, Conchita Lucero told a reporter, I think our kids will finally learn about their ancestors. Tweedy Suazo and other anti-Oñate activists formed a prayer circle in the city council chambers and wept. We worked so hard. And it just, just didn't matter. It didn't matter what we said. It didn't matter what we do.

It didn't matter that we educated. It just didn't matter. If it all happened again today, do you think it would happen the same way? What would be different? I think Pueblos are just a little bit more politically astute now. Tweedy thinks what they learned was that the right arguments aren't enough. You need the right decision makers. She's one of several anti-Oñate activists who went on to get involved in electoral politics.

She's now the chair of the Native American Democratic Caucus of New Mexico. And this last cycle, she helped raise money and get out the vote for Deb Haaland, one of the two Native American women who just became the first ever to be elected to Congress. first ever to be elected to Congress. Today, if you go visit the Finnish memorial, what you'll see isn't Oñate on a horse. It's a compromise. It's really two memorials crammed into one. The first you can grasp without even getting out of your car. It's more than two dozen life-sized bronze figures, men and women, oxen and sheep, trudging up a hill. Juan de Oñate is in front, on foot, no plaque with his name, and under the watchful eye of a security camera that may or may not be pointed at his feet.

The second memorial, right next to it, looks from above like a huge dirt spiral. But from ground level, you really just have to experience it. It's a striking contrast to the kind of art that's really in your face and didactic and says, this is what I mean. I think that reflects Pueblo thinking. It's much more subtle. It doesn't articulate in the way we've become used to as, you know, civilized people, colonized people.

When I met Nora Naranjo-Morse to get a tour, she'd just been picking up trash left inside her part of the memorial. She was holding a donut wrapper as we walked down a dirt path that spirals slowly downhill into the ground. The street disappears behind the berms of chamisas and junipers on our right and left, then the buildings, then Oñate himself, until finally at the center of the spiral, all you can see is the land and water trickling across a rock. And I like that very much because I think that's what it was like a long time ago.

That's how I interpret the past. If you sit low to the ground, you can almost get a glimpse of a world before Oñate arrived. It's an escape. But it's also intended as a confrontation between two totally different worldviews. Because as you walk back out of the spiral... This is what you see. The telephone lines, the sculpture of Oñate coming here, looking north, the stoplight, it's all there.

And so you see that in some ways when they came, they brought us great opportunity, but at such a high cost. The brutal colonization was forever affecting to us. And I think we should never forget that. She hopes her piece of the memorial will remind people of that. But honestly, not that many people come here. The memorial doesn't attract nearly as much attention as the conflict over the memorial did. I think that's why it's important stewardship, not only to pick up the trash, but also to keep that story alive.

Because there are going to be a lot more generations of people coming, wondering, what is this? And that's where our story was going to end, until last year, when an old mystery re-emerged. Remember that first statue we told you about, the one that got its foot stolen? Well, for almost two decades, the foot thieves had remained in the shadows, their identities unknown. And then one day, Chris Eyre, the director of Smoke Signals and Skins, possibly the best known Native American filmmaker, was at La Choza, this great little New Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe. I was sitting there eating a taco with my business partner and someone came up to me and said, I have a story to tell you as I'm eating my taco. And I said, Oh shit, not another story. And you know, I heard a few key words, but I wasn't listening that intently.

And all of a sudden it dawned on me. I said, wait a minute. And I turned and I said, are you talking about what I think you're talking about? It was the guy who cut the foot off the first Oñate statue. Or at least he claimed to be a spokesman for the group who did the deed. And the truth of the matter is that I could never verify it other than I believed it in the end. that I could never verify it other than I believed it in the end. Chris believed the guy, in part because he was presented with a very solid piece of evidence. When Chris met him for a second time in a forest of piñon trees, he unwrapped a piece of black velvet to reveal something no one had seen for 20 years. years. Lo and behold, there appeared probably a 28-inch long bronze patinaed boot of a Spanish conquistador. And I said to myself, wow. Then I looked around and I said to myself, where the

hell am I and what the hell am I doing here? A few chunks of the foot had been shaved off, where they'd made a half-hearted attempt to follow through on those medallions for the historically ignorant. But otherwise, it was still intact and still had the power to grab people's attention. If Chris knows the identity of the foot thieves, he is not revealing it. But he did talk about their motivations. You know, the party involved is not speaking from an activist position and doesn't feel like an activist. This person feels like a historian. He wasn't trying to start a movement or affect policy, just to write what Oñate did to Acoma men in 1599 into the history of the colonization of New Mexico.

That story still doesn't have a statue, and maybe it never will. But in the meantime, the friends of Acoma are holding on to Oñate's foot. Coming up after the break, we talk with Stan Alcorn about everything that's happened with the Oñate statues over the past couple of weeks. And it's been a lot. So stay with us. Okay, so we're back with reporter Stan Alcorn to talk more about what's been happening in New Mexico just in the past couple of weeks.

So, Stan, like you said in the beginning of the show here, that it was a really strange feeling to have spent so much time exploring the history of these monuments and then see them come up in the news again. So, when did you start hearing that there might be some new conflict around the statues? So, the weekend before the protest that we talked about initially is when my phone started ringing. Tweedy Suazo, who had been one of the people vocally opposing the statue in Albuquerque, called me up and told me I needed to look at the front page of the Albuquerque Journal because there was Oñate on the front page. There was a new effort, basically, to have it removed. And there were people who were saying they were going to oppose it in the courts. So she was emailing all the same people who opposed it back in the 90s,

kind of getting geared up for yet another kind of like long bureaucratic fight to now finally remove Oñate. Right, where you go to city council meetings and you talk to historians and you bring all that stuff out. But that's not what happened. What happened next? Yeah, so instead of this really long slog, everything started to happen really quickly. really long slog, everything started to happen really quickly. So to back up, I mean, there are two statues, right? There's the original older Oñate on a horse up on the side of the road. With the foot cut off. Exactly. That had the foot cut off. And then there's the Albuquerque Compromise,

where Oñate is walking with all the settlers. And both of these statues, there's going to be significant protests on Monday. But I started hearing from activists earlier in the day that the county up in northern New Mexico might be actually removing the equestrian Oñate that had its foot cut off. Before people even got there. To stop them from tearing it down, they were going to take it down first. Is that the idea? That does seem to be the idea. There also was already this presence of this right-wing militia, the New Mexico Civil Guard, that has been showing up at Black Lives Matter protests in New Mexico, heavily armed. And so I think there was fear, both of the activists attempting to pull the statue down,

but also of some kind of violent confrontation. Right. They were trying to make it a safer situation by not having this controversial figure at this moment. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So did you actually see the northern New Mexico Añate get hauled away? Like, what was it like? Yeah. First, it was just like rumors. Maybe county workers are doing something. There are trucks there.

And then I got texted a live stream, a Facebook live stream by an activist. Here it comes. Here it comes. And I went to it and... is a bulldozer driving around. And eventually there's a moment where the bulldozer or whatever this heavy equipment is called gets its big shovel underneath and just lifts it up and drives it away. And did it seem like this was a joyous event? What was the tone of the people that were there? Yeah, so the tone was pretty joyful, I would say,

from the people who were watching on the side of the road. But there weren't that many of them. You really got a better sense of the way people felt about this at the planned protest because it still occurred. Now it was no longer really a protest, though, because there was no statue on the pedestal. Right, it was like a party. Yeah, it was like a celebration and kind of like ritual, where it was largely organized by these

activists, the Red Nation, and there were speeches. And then protesters pushed through the gate and actually climbed up on the pedestal where the statue had been before. And there was, you know, dancing and drumming and singing. Activists dipping their hands in red paint and putting those handprints all over the pedestal that had held that horse and Oñate until that morning. This is an act of decolonization! And this is an act of liberation! So that brings us to the other Oñate monument in Albuquerque. So the same day that Oñate statue came down in Alcalde, there was this protest at the statue in Albuquerque.

And we heard a little bit about the protest at the beginning of the show. But I want to hear more about what actually unfolded there. So it sounds like a lot of people we heard from your original story, like Tweety Suazo, were actually at that protest. So, tell me about that. Yeah, it was a lot of the same people who opposed it in the 90s had planned this peaceful prayer vigil to happen in the park across the street from the statues. And so, that's the way the protest starts out. It's the early evening, people are sitting on the grass, people are making speeches. Tweety makes a long speech where she's trying to evening. People are sitting on the grass. People are making speeches. Tweedy makes a long speech where she's trying to inform people, telling them about the history

of this statue and the history of Oñate. And there's a few hecklers at one point, but primarily it's like a speeches, quiet, peaceful affair. But at the same time, and really picking up after the prayer vigil ends, there's a kind of second protest, mostly younger people, activists who want to clearly take more of a direct action that's happening over at the statue itself. And so, did you get a sense from Tweety how she felt about this transition in the protest style and what this felt like for her? Even just what it felt like just to be there back again after all this time, really. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a certain amount of like, okay, we have to inform people again, but still a kind of like stubborn faith and hope that if people just understand, then they'll be able to call their city counselors.

They'll use the levers of democracy the way it's supposed to work. And we can do something about this. But as the prayer vigil ends and she's driving away, she sees that people are now climbing up on the statue. She sees that there are these members of the New Mexico Civil Guard, these mostly white dudes in camo with machine guns. And she was really worried. I'm sitting there thinking, ooh, this doesn't look good. And I'm like, well, I'm glad I'm leaving because I don't want to be here. It was just, no, that's not what we wanted. That's not ever what we wanted. In some ways, she recognizes they have the same goal. She wanted to see that statue taken down, but not the way that they were doing it. So this sort of transition happens, and then a kind of chaos unfolds.

Can you explain a little bit about what happened in terms of the escalation that led to the shooting? So basically, it starts out with people who are climbing on the statue. There's chanting, there's some defacing, there's tying a sign around it. But things seem to escalate when somebody takes a pickaxe and starts chipping at the, I guess it's concrete around Oñate's feet

with the idea to actually start removing the statue with physical force. And it's a chaotic scene, and I'm reconstructing this from a lot of videos from different angles, but it turns out what happened is that there's a guy who was pushing protesters down. He gets kind of pushed out of the crowd. He allegedly maces some people. He's chased away. And in these fragments of video, what you see at the very end is he's being chased away from the protest, essentially. And in the chaos, he pulls out a gun and he fires several shots, shooting a protester. So what do we know about the shooter

and the person that got shot after all the smoke cleared and a few days later? What was the story? So the man who's been charged with the shooting is actually a former city council candidate. His name's Stephen Baca. And much as he was carrying a handgun that day, he's been a very outspoken proponent of open carry. I actually found a post on Facebook where he was showing up at a city council meeting to talk about a plastic bag ordinance with his handgun in the city council chambers. And the man who he shot was an artist and a protester named Scott Williams. So Scott Williams is a white guy. I'm a Native American. I spoke with a close friend of his, Autumn Chacon, and they were part of the same community

of activists and artists. The two of them had gone to Standing Rock together. We don't always see eye to eye as far as our backgrounds, our levels of privilege, our access to certain institutions. But fundamentally, we know what's right and wrong, and we've become very close friends. So he's someone who absolutely, in her words, he was a person who was very intentionally recognizing that as a white person, he could put his body on the line in a way that other people maybe couldn't. And in her view, that's what he did that day. Wow. So there's this awful incident. And just to be clear, Scott Williams, who was shot, he seems to be okay. He's recovering. But meanwhile, what is happening with the statue? Yeah, so they did not have a lot of success with that pickaxe and rope. The statue was still there at the end of the night, but the next morning, kind of similar to what happened in Alcalde, the government decided that in order to avoid further conflict, they would just take it down themselves. So, now you've got all the settlers and a couple Spanish soldiers and then just a little divot in, the original Oñate statue from up north had its foot cut off and there's some activists that had it, have been keeping it hidden, and it shows up. So what was that like? that night. I only realized this later, I think, when I saw the photograph taken by Simone Romero,

a New York Times reporter, that was this kind of amazing image where in front of Teguese Park, you saw this black man holding the stolen foot above his head. It was, yeah, just kind of like an incredible gesture, which I would come to realize that that guy was Brian Hardgrove, member of Public Enemy. Brian Hardgrove, New Yorker, musician. People like to call me an activist. Most people know me from my time with Public Enemy. That's amazing. And what is his connection? Yeah, well, so it turns out that Brian Hargrove moved to Santa Fe, and his wife and daughter are directly connected to the Pueblos in New Mexico, his wife's father's from the Tezuque Pueblo. But he kind of just got brought into this fairly recently. He was approached by some activists. He didn't want to give a lot of specifics. This probably won't be a surprise. But the people who are sort of caretakers of the foot asked him if he'd be willing to be part of this protest.

I jumped right on it. And all I was asked to do was come down to the park in Old Town to support that rally. And to me, it was a perfect opportunity to show a unity between Black Americans and Native Americans that we can't afford to not see that. We have to see that unity. And, you know, Black people in America have been getting the focus since this murder of George Floyd. But there are other groups that need the Black Lives Matter movement to succeed

because they're not being heard from and they need our movement to succeed to give them a better shot too. So he and a bunch of other activists are making this explicit connection between the protests happening across the country, the Black Lives Matter protests, and then also what's happening locally in New Mexico. That's really remarkable to see that union. Yeah, and I would say everyone I talk to sees this. They saw these protests as an extension of the Black Lives Matter protests. Ryan definitely saw them as deeply connected, as focusing on the same basic underlying issues. They're the same issue of an oppressed people being forced to accept a continued oppression.

And so Brian, he talked about how he showed up at the protest, kind of quietly scoping things out when it was still just the prayer vigil. And then at some point, at the right moment, someone gets the foot out of the car and sort of orchestrates this moment for him where he can take it up and just hold it over his head in front of not the whole crowd, but at least a few significant onlookers and someone who could snap a photo. And Brian described just what it was like to hold that foot above his head in that moment. What I felt, I was doing these protests at 20 years old. Now my daughter is doing it at 19. And this is absurd. That's what I felt, that she has to do this now. And I realized what my parents felt when I had to do it. So that crossed my mind as I was holding it.

It's like, when's this going to end? That's the question, right, for all of these protests, is when's it going to end, and is this same fight going to keep being handed down from one generation to the next? And this country has never done things the easy way. It's always done things the difficult way. And so now it's got to deal with multiple issues at once when it could have dealt with each one of them when the time was right.

Although they all existed at the same time because this country was built through blood of the people that are now protesting. But we've had a couple of centuries to deal with, and we've never dealt with it effectively, only to the degree of the nation's comfort. Now the country is forced to reckon. And in Albuquerque, in New Mexico, I mean, that reckoning is really just beginning. Not only as far as statues, though that too, they've already brought down the Diego de Vargas statue in Santa Fe. There's talk of other monuments that might come down. But for the activists, particularly that kind of younger group of activists, they see this as so much

bigger than statues. When I was talking to Autumn Chacon, you know, I asked if taking down the statue was a success. And that's not what she's after. She wants to, like, force the institutions, the Albuquerque Museum, the city of Albuquerque, the Albuquerque Police Department, to really deeply question and root out their own systemic racism. So we would like all civic institutions in the city of Elk Creek, I mean, throughout the nation,

throughout the world, but for a start within the city to look at how they have structural flaws that directly cause economic health disparities within people of color, that there are institutional flaws that make it hard for people of color to get a job there, to be treated as equal, to be paid fairly. I mean, this is complex, and we're seeking actual accountability rather than band-aid solutions. seeking actual accountability rather than band-aid solutions. So Oñate may be gone, but from the perspective of these activists, like they have not won the battle.

This is just the tiniest first step. Yeah. Speaking of first steps, does Brian still have the foot? So Brian, he does not still have the foot. In fact, he says he does not even know where it is. I have no idea. It's not in my possession, and I don't even know the person who has it, so I have no idea. That's the best answer I can give you.

I have no idea. Maybe they'll call me to show up with it somewhere else, I don't know. But if that happens, I'll call you. If that happens, I'll call you. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Stan Alcorn and edited by Delaney Hall. Mix and tech production by Bryson Barnes and Sharif Yusuf. Music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is our senior producer.

Kurt Kolstad is the digital director. The rest of the team is Vivian Leigh, Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Sophia Klotzker, and me, Roman Mars. The investigative podcast that Stan works with, Reveal, is out with an ambitious new project. It's an eight-part series called American Rehab. The series traces the history of a widely used form of drug rehab that claims to cure people by putting them to work for no pay, including at big corporations like Exxon and Walmart. Reveal traces the roots of this model to a dangerous cult called Synanon. In the midst of the country's opioid crisis, American Rehab uncovers how tens of thousands of people are caught in the gears of this rehab machine. Listen to American Rehab now by subscribing to Reveal wherever you get your podcasts.

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