The Los Angeles-based artist Sam Durant is a conceptual activist who makes political art out of difficult histories, from an overlooked legacy of the Black Panthers to the latent racism in American war monuments. Now in his mid-fifties, he grew up in Boston and credits his political awakening, in part, to a protest by the American Indian Movement, which he saw at Plymouth Rock as a child. As he told an interviewer, in January, the event “proposed a very different version of the Thanksgiving holiday—from a Native American perspective, it is hardly a celebration.” That anecdote accrued bitter irony over the Memorial Day weekend, when a sculpture by Durant ignited protests among Dakota Sioux activists in Minneapolis, where it was being installed at the Walker Art Center, as part of a thirty-three-million-dollar renovation of the museum’s sculpture garden, which is situated in a public park owned by the city.

The unpainted wood-and-metal structure, more than fifty feet tall, resembles a high-design jungle gym, with a miscellany of stairways that visitors climb to reach a massive platform—just the kind of participatory sculpture that makes sense in a park where visitors can also play a round of artist-designed mini golf. But the stairs of the piece—which is titled “Scaffold”—refer to seven capital punishments that took place between 1859 and 2006, including the largest mass execution in United States history, in which thirty-eight Dakota Sioux men were hanged, in 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, an hour’s drive from the museum. The Dakota community learned of the sculpture’s embedded history lesson last Thursday, when the museum’s director, Olga Viso, mentioned it in a lengthy description posted online about eighteen new projects that were to be unveiled on June 10th. The next day, protesters gathered at a chain-link fence near Durant’s piece. On Wednesday, after a three-hour meeting with tribal elders, Durant and the Walker announced that the piece would be dismantled, starting at 2 P.M. today. The wood will later be burned, at another site, in a Dakota ceremony.

Whether you see this outcome as enlightened or chilling, what’s not up for debate is the museum’s failure to anticipate that “Scaffold” was bound to stir some level of controversy. The situation inevitably recalls the firestorm that raged this spring, on social media, over Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial—although, in that case, the calls to destroy the art were clearly rhetorical, and the protest inside the museum petered out a day or two after the show opened. In the case of the Durant piece, the outcry was fuelled not only by anger about the cultural appropriation of murder but also by another unfortunate resonance: the current suicide rate among Native American teen-agers is the highest of any population in the United States. As the Sioux elder Sheldon Wolfchild told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Just the other day, we had a memorial for a twelve-year-old girl who strangled herself with a rope. What happens when a young boy or girl looks at that [sculpture] and is giving up?’”

What’s surprising about the Walker’s blind spot is that the museum does have a history, however imperfect, of outreach. Last November, Native youth were trained to lead tours of a billboard-size collage inside its entrance by the Duluth-based Ojibwe artist Frank Big Bear. In 2003, Durant himself had a yearlong residency at the Walker, during which he collaborated on an art work with Ojibwe, Lakota, and Dakota teens. The dispiriting truth, as both Durant and the Walker’s Viso have conceded in heartfelt open letters this week, is that they failed to imagine an audience for “Scaffold” that wasn’t white. To be fair, Durant made the piece, in 2012, for “Documenta,” an exhibition in Germany, where that assumption was likely spot-on. As he wrote, “I made ‘Scaffold’ as a learning space for people like me, white people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who may not consciously know that it exists.” It’s one thing to concede that the art world is, if not white supremacist in the hateful sense of the post-Trump “alt right,” undeniably a place of overwhelming white privilege. But, once Durant learned that “Scaffold” would be installed in a city park, on land that once belonged to the Dakota people, he might have anticipated that the work would take on a new meaning. After all, one of his other pieces reproduces a found protest poster that reads, “You Are on Indian Land, Show Some Respect.”

The decision to destroy the piece is being hailed in the art world as a radical act of atonement—“Scaffold” is now a phoenix from whose ashes, the argument goes, a more attuned art will surely rise. It’s a beautiful vision. I agree that Durant’s piece should never have landed on Dakota soil—not to mention that it looks like bad art. But some nagging questions persist: Should he now destroy every project about others’ histories? I, for one, would hate to see a bonfire piled high with copies of Durant’s book on the posters of the Black Panther Emory Douglas.

*An earlier version of this post misstated the year of the Mankato executions.