Frances Cathryn
is an independent scholar, museum worker, and organizer who fights to recontextualize the stories that have been told to us. Frances has written for Social Text, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and ARTnews, among others.
A Past That Is Not Past
By Frances CathrynThe histories these monuments commemorate are not a nuanced understanding of the past, but present the three figures uncomplicatedly as founders of the region. That founding, however, facilitated the near total displacement of the Esopus, a subtribe of the Lenape people; the enslavement of African Americans and the exploitation of their labor to expand the city; and the persecution of religious communities, among other atrocities the monuments implicitly condone.
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