As we celebrate toppling Confederate, slave trader, and Columbus statues, let’s keep our eyes open to question all the other celebrations of the American colonial project that surround us. Like this one:

Nearly every summer of my life, I’ve been lucky to spend a couple of weeks in a cottage on the Cape Cod shore. Most days there, if it’s clear enough, I’ve loved to play the game of squinting to catch a glimpse of the Pilgrim Monument, sticking up as a faint white needle off the last tip of land, 20 miles away across the bay in Provincetown. I’ve even climbed the tower, 116 steps up.

Finally last summer it occurred to me to ask: Why is it called the Pilgrim Monument? No way the Pilgrims built it, it can’t possibly be from the 1600’s. Turns out, nope. It’s from around 1900, built to solidify white claims to power over the growing Portuguese immigrant population and to attract tourism:

“Yankees had been the dominant force in the community for over two centuries, but by the late nineteenth century, their economic power and social prestige were waning. Portuguese fishing captains dominated the fishing industry. In 1900 nearly 45% of the town’s residents were of Portuguese descent. The monument would commemorate and reinforce the Yankees’ role in Provincetown.

“The monument would also have direct economic benefits. Plymouth had built its first monument to the Pilgrims in the 1860s, giving it a big head start when it came to attracting the growing numbers of tourists who visited coastal Massachusetts in search of colonial history. With the demise of its whaling industry, Provincetown needed to capture a share of this expanding tourist economy.”*

It’s the American history we weren’t taught, in a nutshell. In a beautiful, fun landmark.

Not saying we need to tear down the Pilgrim Monument. But we sure do need to tear down what it stood for. And we can’t do that unless we see clearly how it permeates our history and how we still perpetuate it in our society today: white people asserting dominance for economic gain.

*www.massmoments.org/moment-details/pilgrim-monument-completed-in-provincetown.html