Decolonize This Museum IV, 2019
It has been four years since our communities converged at this museum. Then, we put forth the following demands: Rename the Day, Respect the Ancestors, Remove the Statue. After three annual gatherings, none of these demands have been met. The museum remains silent about calls for the replacement of Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, which has been enacted by dozens of cities and states around the country. The museum is annotating some of its displays, but it uses these as token gestures to insulate itself from calls to overhaul the framework of the museum as a whole. The museum has claimed it has no jurisdiction over the Roosevelt monument. Yet it has installed an educational plaque on the structure asking its viewers to consider “both sides” of the genocidal history it represents, perfectly in keeping with the recommendations by the city’s Monument Commission, which voted to re-sanctify both the Roosevelt monument and the widely despised Columbus monument at 59th street. This museum is maintained largely by taxpayers and it stands on “public” land, which we know is occupied ancestral territory of the Lenape. Yet the institution has failed to respond to the concerns voiced by the diverse communities of the city that it claims to represent and serve. On this Indigenous People’s Day, we declare our intent to intensify the crisis of legitimacy faced by this institution. We now highlight the presence on the board of figures like Richard Lefrak, one of the wealthiest real-estate predators in New York, and a donor to the 2020 campaign of Donald Trump; Rebekah Mercer, a primary architect of the ascendency of Trump in 2016; Jacklyn Bezos, mother of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and even the great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt himself. Whether conservative or liberal in their political outlook, those profiteering from genocide, displacement, dispossession, and incarceration should fear our movement as it grows. Decolonization, Abolition, Anti-Imperialism, and Anti-Capitalism inform our work and animate our desires, which point far beyond the museum and extend to the structures of power and wealth at the city at large.