Cville Votes to Remove Lewis and Clark Statue
By Sandy Hausman • Nov 16, 2019

As Charlottesville prepares to redevelop a section of West Main Street, attention has turned to a statue of Lewis and Clark boldly facing west as a young native American woman huddles behind them. City council is planning to remove the hundred-year-old sculpture and perhaps replace it with something that reflects the important role of Sacagawea.

The city brought four descendents of Sacagawea to Charlottesville from Idaho, and they began the day with a traditional smudging ceremony – burning plants in a shell bowl to rid the area of negative energy and invite harmony.

The talks that followed were friendly, but frank and – at times – emotional. Emma George recalled her reaction to the sight of a cowering native woman.

"This morning I went out there to look at that statue," she said, choking back tears. "It did not make me feel good at all. It was humiliating."

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Local

Charlottesville takes down two more statues, deemed offensive to Native Americans, in weekend of removals

By Teo Armus and Hannah Natanson

July 11, 2021 | Updated yesterday at 7:52 p.m. EDT

CHARLOTTESVILLE — It was a big weekend for statue removals in this university town where they've become a flash point in recent years.

Shortly after the city carted away a monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and a statue of Robert E. Lee that triggered a deadly weekend of violence in 2017, workers carried off two more statues that critics said depicted Native Americans in a racist and disparaging manner.

One statue, which sat in a grassy park on the University of Virginia campus, showed Revolutionary War general George Rogers Clark riding a horse toward three unarmed Native Americans as two frontiersmen waited behind him, one of them in the act of raising his rifle. The pedestal declared in engraved letters, “CONQUEROR OF THE NORTHWEST,” a reference to his battle prowess against the British. ... The second statue, outside a downtown federal courthouse and meant to honor Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the Pacific, showed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark standing straight and staring into the distance as Sacagawea crouched at their side.

The takedown of the Rogers Clark statue Sunday had been months in the making: A U-Va. racial equity task force recommended removing it last summer, and the university’s Board of Visitors approved the suggestion that fall, according to the Daily Progress. By contrast, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously in an emergency meeting Saturday to take down the Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea statue.

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City Council member Lloyd Snook said in an interview Saturday that he regrets that the rapid-fire removals this weekend are causing some to link Lewis and Clark with Lee and Jackson. Unlike the latter two, Lewis and Clark should not be remembered for committing treason against the United States, he noted. ... “It’s unfortunate for history that they will end up getting lumped together,” Snook said. “But it was fortunate for the city that we were able to get it done without additional cost.”

By Teo Armus
Teo Armus covers politics, government and other regional issues in Arlington and Alexandria for The Washington Post. He joined The Post as a staff writer in 2019. Twitter https://twitter.com/teoarmus

By Hannah Natanson
Hannah Natanson is a reporter covering education and K-12 schools in Virginia. Twitter https://twitter.com/hannah_natanson