A while back I blogged about a picture that Martha Jones took of two "dueling" monuments at the courthouse in Talbot County, Maryland. It was a Confederate Soldier versus Frederick Douglass. Now I want to talk about two dueling monuments at the state capitol building in Oklahoma City. One is a romantic vision of a cowboy -- from 1930 -- and another is of a Native American woman from 1989 (Allan C. Houser's As Long as the Waters Flow). They are less in tension than the two Martha provided, but I think they reflect two very different visions of Oklahoma. What I'm particularly interested in here is that the Native American statue is from 1989 -- somewhat before the movement to remove monuments and rename things really got underway. (Yes, I know that street re-naming was well-underway by 1989.) I wonder if this is further evidence that often ideas emerge and are tested in places outside what we think of as the centers of intellectual and political power? Oklahoma certainly feels like a place where new ideas can be tried -- even if in many ways it is more conservative than others parts of our country.
And as to the conservative part, coming up soon ... a picture of the Oklahoma Ten Commandments monument, which I have to say is placed in a pretty obscure place at the capitol building.
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