Indigenous community members and allies rallied Saturday evening for the removal of a statue of Christopher Columbus in downtown Syracuse.

The Resilient Indigenous Action Collective organized the rally in Columbus Circle and drew a crowd of at least 100 people. The collective is composed of Indigenous people who live on the land now known as Syracuse and New York state.

“We follow the calls of decades of Indigenous activism across the United States to remove a violent and false image of Columbus,” an organizer said. “The statue must be removed by the city of Syracuse.”

RIAC is calling for the city to take down the statue within two days. Mayor Ben Walsh, who attended the rally, announced Friday that he will create a Columbus Circle Action Group to plan the development of a learning site in the circle and to provide recommendations on the statue’s future.

The action group will involve Indigenous community members, according to a press release from the city. But RIAC organizers will only consider dialogue after the monument is removed, organizer Ionah Scully said. 

“We do not dialogue with oppressors or colonizers,” said Scully, who is Cree Métis of the Michel First Nation. The Indigenous community must be centered in discussions regarding the space in Columbus Circle, they said.

The organizers are still deciding the collective’s next steps if the statue is not taken down within two days, Scully said after the rally. The organizers are not going anywhere, they said.

The collective’s calls for the city to take down the statue in downtown Syracuse come as residents across the U.S. dismount, topple and urge the removal of similar statues of Columbus and Confederate monuments. Columbus enslaved Indigenous peoples, including the Taíno people of the modern-day Carribean, who died in mass from murder, enslavement and disease following his arrival.

Seeing the statue of Columbus harms Indigenous community members and people of color, said Danielle Smith, a member of the Onondaga Nation, at the rally. Removing the statue should fall on Walsh, not the organizers, she said.

“That shouldn’t be our labor,” Smith said. “We’ve been fighting for so long, and it’s not just my generation.” 

A petition calling for the removal of the monument — which has stood atop the circle since 1934 — has generated over 13,000 signatures as of Saturday night. Blake Garland-Tirado, a graduate student at Syracuse University and the creator of the petition, said the statue should be removed lawfully but with expediency. 

If Walsh continues to act neutrally in regards to removing the monument, the Syracuse and U.S. community will see him as a mayor who did not work to ease racial tensions, Garland-Tirado said.

“The mayor has the chance today to either stand on the right side of history or on the side of racism and hatred, lies, violence, slavery” Garland-Tirado said. “And here’s the big one: genocide.”

Several organizers from Last Chance for Change, a movement that has marched peacefully in Syracuse for nearly a month to protest police brutality, attended the rally. Indigenous sovereignty and Black liberation are intertwined, Scully said.

Dramar Felton, an organizer with Last Chance for Change, led chants of “take it down,” in front of the monument.

Italian Americans also attended the rally in support of the monument’s removal, said organizer Hayley Marama Cavino, who is Māori and of the Ngāti Whitikaupeka and Ngāti Pūkenga tribes, after the event. Members of the city’s Italian American community raised money to construct the statue in an expression of gratitude toward Syracuse. 

Two days is not an unreasonable amount of time for removing the monument of Columbus, Cavino said. Philadelphia announced plans Thursday to remove a statue of Columbus in the city, she said.

“What side of history does Syracuse want to be on?” Cavino said.

The rally was intended to leverage and center Indigenous voices, said organizer Ethan Tyo, who is of Akwesasne Mohawk Territory. The collective hopes the city listens.

“There seems to be a complacent acknowledgement that there’s an issue,” he said. “The reason why we did this was because there’s no action being taken.” 

“It’s not just a Columbus statue. It’s a Columbus statue on Onondaga (Nation) land.”

Published on June 28, 2020 at 12:04 am

Contact Emma: esfolts@syr.edu