Roosevelt Statue Should Be Melted, Not Dumped In Dakota: Petition

Upper West Side NY

07 March, 2022

3:40 PM

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UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — New York City needs to check its "metropolitan arrogance" and melt down the Teddy Roosevelt statue it's trying to dump in North Dakota, a new petition contends. "New Yorkers cannot simply dump their toxic cultural products in other communities," the petition reads. "The monument's bronze content could be melted down ... or simply disposed of." North Dakota artists and academics launched the petition in the last week of February to stop the American Museum of Natural History from transferring the controversial statue to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora. The group doesn't want the statue for many of the same reasons the city and the museum decided to dismantle it — with Black and Indigenous men standing beneath him, critics said it celebrated racism and colonization. The statue's new proposed home at Theodore Roosevelt National Park — which rests on ancestral lands seized by the U.S. government from Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) people — only adds insult to centuries of injury, the group writes. "The Theodore Roosevelt National Park is irredeemably associated with ethnic cleansing and land theft," the petition states. "We believe that the decision to send the monument to a site that is so culturally important to the MHA Nation is either an act of breathtaking insensitivity or of metropolitan arrogance." The American Museum of Natural History did not immediately respond to Patch's request for comment. However, a New York City Design Commission spokesperson noted in a statement to Hyperallergic that an advisory council — which will include Indigenous Tribal and Black community representatives — will guide the "reconsideration of the statue." UWS Teddy Roosevelt Statue Is Coming Down After Final VoteThe statue is currently slated to be transferred to the privately funded, not-yet-completed Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which is set to open in 2026. These North Dakotans argue history would be best served by melting the decades-old statue down into a pool of molten bronze, the petition states. "We stand in solidarity with the MHA Nation's chairman's expressed the sentiment that it would be 'ignorant and inappropriate' to relocate the monument to North Dakota," reads the petition. "No one can ignore Roosevelt's own, well-documented contempt for Indigenous people." The petition has also been signed by five members of New York City's 2017 Mayoral Commission on City Art, Monuments and Marker's a group among the first to review the historical context of statues and monuments across Manhattan. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and the Roosevelt family supported the museum's request to remove the "problematic statue" of the 26th president, which shows him riding on horseback. The plan was approved by the museum and the NYC Public Design Commission on June 21 to transfer the statue to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota. So Long, Teddy: Famed UWS Roosevelt Statue Removed OvernightThe bronze monument was removed from outside the entrance of the famed Upper West Side museum on Jan. 19.