If you’re not familiar with it, the picture in this post is of the Gateway Arch - though the full name of the site is the “Jefferson National Expansion Memorial”. It’s a monument to the fact that America “bought” a bunch of land from someone who didn’t even own it. Then a bunch of white people moved in and stole the land from the actual inhabitants and genocided them. This is celebrated with a massive, internationally-recognized monument and virtually no (white) Americans think this is wrong or even just weird. A embodiment of the celebration of white supremacy. Death to America.
(As an aside, I’ve been inside the museum here. They use a decent amount of floor space to talk about native Americans and even sometimes mention things about how they were killed and their land stolen. But I noticed they will also say things like “The Black Hawk War started when the Fox refused to leave Illinois.” Neglecting the fact that ALL of the treaties between the US and native Americans were 1,000% under major duress and were essentially “sign this or we kill you”. And with Black Hawk in particular, the US leveraged that threat to get appallingly lopsided terms. Like giving up half the state of Illinois to free one person from jail (who was innocent anyway). I’ve noticed that about other national parks, they all seem to refer to these treaties as perfectly legitimate - which I guess they feel they have to or otherwise they might lose their claims to the land in the present day. Quelle horreur!)
PilotWings taught me that if I fly through that, I get a gold medal
Fun fact: I know a Cessna pilot in St. Louis and if you even dare to fly through the Arch the FAA will throw the book at you. He said you’re looking at long prison sentence if you do it.
they put it there because st louis' skyline sucked, that is the reason why it exists
We took a field trip to it when I was a wee lad. They have a little gift shop underneath and metal detectors. You can take an elevator to the top. It's fairly guarded but I reckon if you had the gumption you could
Yes. You sit in this kind of tilted elevator thing and ride up to the top, where there are lots of windows and you can look at the Mississippi and watch boats. It's very neat as an object, but it's a memorial to genocide, so not great. America is a land of contrasts.
Yeah, there's an elevator to the top and you can walk around on a short hallway, it's got windows so you can sthe stadium.
but I reckon if you had the gumption you could
what are you an anarchist from the 1850s. What would blowing up a random monument achieve
like you said children go in there
look at the eagleton courthouse and tell me if that building is not CLAMORING to be adjusted into the shape of a mallet
i agree but it doesnt even make the top 10 list of monuments that need to be destroyed in the usa.
Yeah it doesn't look like a genocider or slaver so could be worse.
the first and foremost should be returning Six Grandfathers (and the rest of the Black Hills) to the Sioux/Plains tribes & letting them do whatever the hell they want to the four monstrosities we carved into it to serve as a long-running monument to the fact that the US has always been a terrible nation run by terrible people if the treaty we broke to claim it as ours is any evidence (you know - other than the previous 100+ years of genocide at that point).
Just rename it and make the attached museum reflect how horrible the genocide of American Indians was instead of pushing Manifest Destiny bullshit.
Last I heard "American Indian" was narrowly preferred by the people themselves (e.g., the American Indian Movement) over "Native American," with greater specificity ("Kiowa tribe, Navajo nation") being the best approach where appropriate. Have not looked into it in the past couple of years, though.
A lot of Indigenous people refer to themselves as Indigenous when not using their nation or tribe or band.
From a practical standpoint, you will alienate like 99% of the locals who know it as the icon of their city and aren’t really familiar with what it really stands for. Like telling San Franciscans to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge or New Yorkers to tear down the Statue of Liberty. Better to repurpose it as a monument to the historic and ongoing struggle for liberation of the indigenous people of North America, and have the museum reflect that.
Framing this as a monument to genocide is a great point of agitation.
This is beside the point but for some reason I was under the impression that the arch went across the river and not just beside it
Why'd they have to go and put the country's largest botanical garden there.
Yeah, I was referencing the fact that it was in St. Louis and not another city.
if you think the other cities are less colonial/genocidal, I have unfortunate news to share
The Botanical Gardens is truly a gem. And as others have said, St. Louis only has a marginally more prominent role in genocide as other US cities (but it actually did have an outsized role - the Army’s Department of the West i.e. the army group that genocided the native Americans west of the Mississippi was headquartered there).
