In the middle of the night and with dozens of Native Americans watching, San Francisco city workers tied safety ropes around a 124-year-old bronze statue and pulled. Carefully, they dislodged the piece from a granite platform and laid it on top of a flatbed truck. It was a moment stoked with meaning. After decades of effort, the Early Days statue, a symbol of colonization and oppression to many, was gone.

Those who gathered at the removal last week didn’t celebrate with fire torches. They only prayed, sang hymns, and looked on morosely at the empty platform. That’s what happens when civic institutions, in this case the city arts commissions, finally see a people as worthy of protection.

“I feel like it is a win. I feel good about it. [But] there is still a lot of work to be done,” Desirae Harp, a Mishewal Ona*tsáTis (Wappo) and Diné (Navajo) tribe member told me.

Crews removing the statue on 14 September. Photograph: AP

Erected in the aftermath of the California mission era, the Early Days statue depicts a Native American on his back, defeated, a Catholic priest above him pointing to the heavens, and an anglicized vaquero bestriding the scene in triumph. The statue is part of the Pioneer Monument celebrating the state’s origins. Native Americans saw it as dehumanizing art but no one had managed to convince politicians to take it down. It wasn’t until gender- and racially-diverse city boards, as well as backlash against Eurocentric depictions of dominance, that change came.

Over the last few months, I spoke with Native Americans who said the existence of this type of art in a public sphere kept alive false narratives. That native people’s systematic killing was a necessary means to an end of the state’s development and current prosperity. It’s the type of thinking that becomes gospel if only one side tells you what to believe in.

A long road

The journey to the statue’s current undisclosed location – where officials say it’s safely preserved – has been long and winding.

In 1996, a plaque was added to Early Days to explain what happened to natives but political pressure resulted in language that reeked of false objectivity. Catholic leaders rejected copy fully blaming missionaries for Native deaths, using disease and malnutrition as top factors rather than mistreatment and murder.

The Early Days statue. Photograph: Jeff Chiu/AP

Last year, concern grew over Early Days in the aftermath of the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, incited by the removal of a statue of confederate General Robert E Lee. On 2 October 2017, after the public asked leaders to remove the statue, the arts commission passed a resolution to initiate a review. At a following meeting, it voted to put it in storage.

But there was pushback. Frear Stephen Schmid, a Sonoma county lawyer, said the commission didn’t have the legal right to remove it. Broadly, he said art shouldn’t be changed and the statue merited historical preservation, which the board of appeals agreed with. People really got upset.

Asking for a rehearing, city directors noted a similar appeal to cultural understanding had been approved – the city administrative code had changed Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. Continued display, they said, “causes real and sustained harm to San Francisco’s Native American community” especially when old visual stereotypes are “now universally viewed as disrespectful, misleading, and racist”. This led to the new, final vote to remove last week. As for Schimd, he said he’s going to sue the city.

As the fight against white supremacist symbols grows in America under a president that supports them all but explicitly, citizens are ramping up more tear downs. San Jose removed a statue of Christopher Columbus and Arcata’s William McKinley statue’s days are numbered (he broke up tribal governments). More than 30 other cities are either in discussion to or recently removed statues including southern hubs such as Atlanta, Birmingham and Nashville.

In related news, ESPN found there’s an increase in US statue-building of sports figures, 80% of them white males, many in coaching, the most segregated position in all athletics.

Lacking accuracy

Native people like Harp say part of the problem with statues is not just that they’re disrespectful and emotionally triggering but that they’re factually inaccurate. The Native American depicted in Early Days, for example, was from the Plains but native people of the Bay Area were Ohlone.

There’s also not enough educational support to help people contextualize complicated history. Sara Chase, a UC Berkeley educator, says California school curriculums fail to provide accurate perspectives of Native Americans or other minorities. Asian, Latino and black colleagues of mine remember school-grade projects about the missions without learning of Native genocide.

A statue of Robert E Lee in Charlottesville. The Early Days statue has drawn comparisons to Confederate monuments. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

And sometimes, poor education about minorities is by design. In Arizona, ethnic studies curriculums are banned and because of the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, many schools were forced to focus on standardized tests as opposed to culturally-accurate history.

“California schools teach for tests or lose [public funding]. So certain histories of people are not taught. It’s a test-taking obsession, monetization of knowledge,” she told me in a call.

Art is in the eye of the community

So if the statue doesn’t provide an accurate idea of history, is it valid as a piece of public art? Jeff Hou, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, says no. He says the public realm is accountable to one audience – the public.

“In the public realm, works of arts and design are subject to the public process. In other words, the public can have a say in what’s appropriate in a public space in a democracy,” he told me.

For the public to decide what’s appropriate art, Hou says, systems in power shouldn’t be weighted to a “limited category of individuals, such as members of particular gender, class and race”. In San Francisco, this means commissions should embody societal changes. “As society changes,” he says, “it’s natural those whom are historically marginalized must gain a stronger voice”.

And art seeking to express history doesn’t need to stay the same. History is always revisited based on new discoveries and affects how it’s interpreted. In Yale professor Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place, the role women and minorities had in creating Los Angeles were reclaimed through ethnic public street murals.

In creating a new open space in front of City Hall, the commissions may have provided a new space and place for a similar reclamation. That is, if the next lawsuit doesn’t stop them.