One hundred years after being erected on West Main Street, the University of Virginia’s George Rogers Clark statue has finally been taken down.
On Sunday morning, the day after the city took down three other statues, crews began removing UVA’s racist monument at 7:30am. Members of the Monacan Indian Nation and other North American Indigenous communities, UVA students, activists, and other community members gathered to watch. Just under three hours later, the monument was hauled away to an undisclosed location, drawing rounds of applause and cheers from the crowd.
Paid for by philanthropist Paul Goodloe McIntire, the statue depicts Clark, who was born in Albemarle County in 1752, mounted on a horse attacking a Native American family, with three white frontiersmen holding guns and ammunition behind him.
Last summer, UVA’s Racial Equity Task Force recommended removing the statue—a symbol of white supremacy and genocide—and building a Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies in its place. The Board of Visitors approved the removal in September.
The statue calls Clark the “Conqueror of the Northwest,” a claim more rooted in mythmaking than actual history, scholars say. Clark fought both with and against Indigenous tribes during the Revolutionary War, and led militias who slaughtered Native Americans and stole their land after the war.
Clark wasn’t even a particularly consequential figure, making the awful statue all the more galling. “To claim that Clark was the ‘Conqueror of the Northwest’ is absurd,” writes UVA historian Christian McMillen in a 2020 UVA Today op-ed on the statue. “Clark played a minor role in the centuries-long struggle for control between the French, the English, [and] the Native peoples.”
A university committee is currently working on a tribal consultation policy, and has invited tribal nations to help decide what to do with the statue and the space where it once stood.
Since he was a UVA student nearly 20 years ago, Guy Lopez, an enrolled member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, has advocated for the removal of the statue.
“That Clark statue says it’s okay to take whatever [Indigenous people] have. If they’re in the way, they can be destroyed,” says Lopez, co-founder of Native American and Indigenous Studies at UVA. “They made a monument to violence and evil.”
“But the question now is, what difference does [the removal] make for the University of Virginia?” he says. “It actually may be a step backwards if the university doesn’t follow through with actual substantive programs and changes that Indigenous people need.”
According to Lopez, the university has denied many of NAIS’ funding requests, but spent $400,000 to remove the statue. It also has yet to establish a formal NAIS program, or commit to hiring Indigenous tenure-track faculty and postdoctoral students, though it has received a multi-million dollar grant for Indigenous studies. And he says he’s seen little effort put into recruiting Native American students, who make up less than 1 percent of the undergraduate population.
“This is my country,” says Lopez. Even with the statue down, “I have no home at the University of Virginia.”
