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ABSTRACT
This essay compares South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the US’s This is the Place monument, both built to commemorate cross-country settler movements, for how the two contemporaneous monuments memorialize the nineteenth-century historical event in the service of the racial politics of the twentieth century. While the Voortrekker monument’s relief sculptures represent Black Africans as savages and intractable impediments to civilization, the This is the Place monument denies race as a factor in settlement, thus attempting to absolve settlers of the racially motivated violence that attended their colonization of the Great Basin. Perched on hilltops towering over their respective settler communities, both monuments similarly draw from the language of Beaux Arts classicism to venerate their subjects as civilizing heroes amid the chaos of Western colonialism and through comparison, we can see how both assert the colonizers’ race and religion as offering a divine sanction to their acts of conquest.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We use “white” to refer to settlers primarily descended from Europeans. In the tradition of critical race studies, we seek to unpack the ways that settlers descended from various European nations constructed and used ideas of whiteness and blackness. In the nineteenth century, Americans and South Africans spoke of “races” to differentiate among various cultural groups, such as between English and Dutch settlers; in this essay we use a twentieth-century conception of “race” to focus on the othering of those viewed as nonwhite. See Ingram, “Racializing Babylon,” and Reeve, Religion of a Different Color for discussion of the racial construction of whiteness as part of the settlement project.
2 Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Latter-day Saints” or “LDS,” commonly referred to themselves as “Mormons” during this era.
3 Following Veracini, Wolfe, and other settler colonial studies scholars, we use the term “settler” for European-descended inhabitants living on lands appropriated from Indigenous populations in both the US and South Africa. Neither the Mormons nor the Afrikaners are politically dominant in their respective nations at present, but both remain settler groups. Veracini, Settler Colonialism; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology.
4 The use of “Boer” (Dutch for “farmer”) and “Afrikaner” (“African”) as terms to designate the Dutch settlers to South Africa indicates how the Dutch settlers took on a new and distinct identity as Indigenous to South Africa and distinct from other European settlers. The “Great Trek” was in fact a narrative construction collapsing four separate Treks under four separate leaders. Cf Official Guide, 40; Rankin and Schneider, From Memory to Marble, I:18–26.
5 On Voortrekker, see Coombes, History after Apartheid; Delmont, “The Voortrekker Monument: Monolith to Myth”; and Leslie, “Bitter Monuments.” Rankin and Schneider’s new two-volume set, From Memory to Marble, is the first book to provide a detailed accounting of the design decisions behind each panel of the monument’s elaborate frieze. On This is the Place, see Patterson, Pioneers in the Attic and “The Plymouth Rock of the American West”; Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments; and Boxer, “’This is the Place!’: Disrupting Mormon Settler Colonialism.”
6 Cf Nora, “Between Memory and History”; Bodnar, Remaking America; Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves; Coombes; History After Apartheid; Marschall, Landscape of Memory; and Leibowitz, Making Memory Space.
7 Prescott, Rees, and Weaver-Hightower, “Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness.”
8 Shipps, Mormonism, 57–65, 111–12.
9 White and White, “Polygamy and Mormon Identity”; Mauss, “The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation and Identity”; Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom; and Hansen, Frontier Religion.
10 Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments, chap. 4; Patterson, Pioneers in the Attic, 47–55; Laga, “In Lieu of History”; Flake, “Re-placing Memory”; Eliason, “The Cultural Dynamics of Historical Self-Fashioning”.
11 Coombes, History After Apartheid, 28; cf Ross, A Concise History of South Africa, Thompson History of South Africa.
12 “Sons of Pioneers Reelect Officers and Adopt 12-Year Plan of President Morris.”
13 Patterson, Pioneers in the Attic, 44. In fact, Young was so ill when he arrived that he had to be propped up in the back of a wagon to look into the Salt Lake Valley.
14 See Francaviglia, The Mormon Landscape.
15 The Salt Lake Temple, constructed between 1853–1893, remains the Latter-day Saints’ most prominent religious building. See Hamilton, Nineteenth-Century Mormon Architecture and City Planning.
16 See “200,000 View July 24 Events” and “Centennial Mounts To Climax Today.”
17 “Dedicate $350,000 Monument Climaxing Century of Mormonism.”
18 Young, “Mahonri M. Young Papers”; and Dorius, “Crossroads in the West.”
19 See Alexander, Mormonism in Transition; Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region.
20 Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments, 130–69.
21 Patterson, Pioneers in the Attic, 45.
22 See Crampton, “The Voortrekker Monument, the Birth of Apartheid and Beyond”; Delmont, “The Voortrekker Monument”; and Autry, Desegregating the Past.
23 Official Guide, 10.
24 Official Guide, 29.
25 Coombes, History After Apartheid, 28.
26 Official Guide, 10. Also see Official Guide chapters 9–10.
27 Evans, “Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa.”
28 Autry, Desegregating the Past, 122.
29 Official Guide, 57.
30 Delmont, “The Voortrekker Monument: Monolith to Myth,” 101. CF Evans “Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa.” Steencamp, “A Shared Spatial Symbolism” remarks on similarities between the Voortrekker Monument and the Völkerslachtdenkmal (1913) in Leipzig, Germany.
31 Official Guide, 34. The lower level also contains several halls dedicated to showcasing art and antiques associated with the Voortrekkers, including a large tapestry depicting scenes from the Voortrek. Cf Official Guide chapters 7–8.
32 Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments, chapter 2.
33 Official Guide, 38.
34 Rankin and Schneider, From Memory to Marble, I: 14.
35 Official Guide, 36.
36 Coombes, History After Apartheid, 28.
37 The authenticity of this treaty has been questioned by historians. CF Rankin and Schneider, From Memory to Marble, II: 215–67.
38 Official Guide, 48.
39 Pratt, Imperial Eyes.
40 “The Historical Background to the Voortrekker Monument,” Official Guide, 18.
41 Official Guide, 33.
42 Rankin and Schneider, From Memory to Marble, I: 365–69; II: 205–300.
43 Official Guide, 93.
44 Ibid., 49.
45 Autry, Desegregating the Past, 125. “Dingane” is an alternate spelling of “Dingaan.”
46 Delmont, “The Voortrekker Monument,” 103.
47 Official Guide, 50.
48 Steenkamp, Apartheid to Democracy, 251.
49 Official Guide, 53.
50 Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, 50.
51 Carter, Founding Fort Utah, 33–35; and Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, 23–35.
52 Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, 55–57.
53 Cf Beeton, “Teach Them to Till the Soil,” 306; Metcalf, “A Precarious Balance,” 33–34; and Farmer, On Zion’s Mount, 282–327.
54 Cf Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings; and Deloria, Playing Indian.
55 See Hebard, Washakie.
56 These were widely published and easily available to Young. See, for example, Franklin, “Washakie, the Neglected,” 572.
57 “Elkskin Showing Feats of Chief Washakie.”
58 In her reading of the This is the Place monument, Patterson argues that Washakie represents a “noble savage” who stands passively, while the European American figures appear in action or holding “tools of civilization.” Patterson, Pioneers in the Attic, 45 and 248, n. 38.
59 Madsen, The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre.
60 McPherson, “Paiute Posey and the Last White Uprising.”
61 Simmons, The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico.
62 Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy.
63 Official Guide, 81.
64 Cf Autry, “The Monumental Reconstruction of Memory in South Africa”; Grundlingh, “A Cultural Conundrum?”; Kruger and van Heerden, “The Voortrekker Monument Heritage Site”; Leibowitz, “Making Memory Space”; Marschall, The Landscape of Memory; and Peffer, “Censorship and Iconoclasm.”
65 Murray, Commemorating and Forgetting, 72.
66 Antonites and Nel, “The Voortrekker Monument as Memory Institution.”
67 Cf Autry, “Monumental Reconstruction of Memory in South Africa,” 157; Girshick, “Ncome Museum/Monument: From Reconciliation to Resistance”; and Rankin, “A Janus-Like Juncture.”
68 Holmes, The Black and White Rainbow, 3.
69 Voortrekker Monument Website.
70 More than 700 monuments to Confederate leaders or soldiers were erected across the United States; the vast majority not in the immediate aftermath of the 1861–65 US Civil War, but at the turn of the twentieth century to shore up white supremacy. Since 2015, racial violence has spurred many American cities to reconsider their meaning. Some 70 have been removed by city leaders or toppled by protesters. Southern Poverty Law Center, “SPLC Releases Update to Whose Heritage Dataset,” accessed 30 June 2020, https://www.splcenter.org/presscenter/splc-releases-updates-whose-heritage-dataset. The classic work on the meaning of those Confederate monuments is Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves.
71 Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments, 280–98.
72 See Garrett, Making Lamanites.
73 Brown, “Indians Balk at Offer to Take Part in Celebration.”
74 This Is the Place Heritage Park, “Pioneer Days.”
75 Ibid.
76 Clayton, “This Is the Place Dedicates Native American Village.”
77 “Interim Report,” Internal Memorandum, to Pioneer Trail Advisory Council from Vincent P. Foley, 21 March 1975, Utah State Archives and Records Service, Series 23449.
78 Boxer, “This is the Place!” 87.
79 This Is The Place Heritage Park, “Native American Village.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Cynthia Culver Prescott
Cynthia Culver Prescott is Professor of History at the University of North Dakota, USA. She combines social history and material culture methods to study the intersections of gender, race, social class, and historical memory. She is the author of Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), and Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (University of Arizona Press, 2007).
Nathan Rees
Nathan Rees is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of West Georgia, USA. His work explores the intersections of religion and colonization in the art of the American West. He is the author of Mormon Visual Culture and the American West (Routledge, 2021).
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower is a Professor of English specializing in postcolonial studies and Chair of English at Virginia Tech. In addition to monographs on island castaway narratives (Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals and Fantasies of Conquest, Minnesota 2007) and settler literatures (Frontier Fictions: Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt, Palgrave 2018), she has co-edited with Peter Hulme the collection Postcolonial Film: History, Empire, Resistance (Routledge 2014), co-edited with Yuting Huang another collection on settler literatures (Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space and Race, Routledge 2018), and recently co-edited with Janne Lahti the collection Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World on Film (Routledge 2020).