 Come back to ThinkTek on a given Thursday morning, it's a noon show here, and history is here to help. You know, as time goes by, I appreciate the show and its progenitor, Peter Haffenberg, all the more, because we live in a world where history is somehow disconnected, and it's our job on this show to connect it all back again to put us in the context of a dynamic history, a long-term history, a history that moves into the future. So today we're going to talk to Charlene Nakamoto-Livine, and we're going to talk about a very interesting topic. We're going to talk about monuments, and it's the proper memorials and monuments for all, and for all is important, and proper is important. So let's start, Peter, with a hello, and would you please introduce Charlene? My pleasure. Aloha, everyone. Professor Levine, the personal friend, who won't allow that to distort our conversation by any means at all. She holds a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, teaches at Honolulu Community College, which includes teaching at external campuses, so she has a real hands-on view of our college students and those who are taking courses even our time. Original scholarship was very important about the plantation societies here, particularly late 19th, early 20th century. She does very important work with oral history, ethnic studies, social history, and today she's going to talk to us about, I think it's fair to say a new curriculum for her, which is to, along with her students, explore this current debate about monuments and memorials. So I'm looking forward to her discussing American, particularly Hawaiian memorials, and perhaps I can provide some complimentary information about this debate in Europe. You just not reserve the United States by any means at all. So, Charlene, thank you for joining us, and let me turn it over to you and Jake. Yeah, Charlene, I was thinking about this show, you know, and what I thought about was all those Confederate, Howley people and statues in the South. And I said to myself, you know, at the time they went to the trouble of designing, no constructing, and paying homage to those statues, that was what the public at the time wanted. And when we pulled them down, when we criticized them now, query are we respecting the history of the moment in which they were created? We're rewriting history through the lens of how we feel about things now, aren't we? Well, one of the things that people often aren't aware of is that the Confederate statues didn't go up, you know, right after the Civil War. It was during the Jim Crow era, the late 1890s, early 1900s, when the children of the Confederacy, of the Confederate leaders wanted their fathers to be remembered and revered in a way. And they wanted to rewrite history. So it wasn't really, you know. And that's an interesting point. Right, in my mind, yeah. It's not so much that we rewriting it today, but they were engaged in rewriting it then. And the only thing I would add is there are two spikes in the building of what we consider Confederate royals. Jolyne's actually right with the late 90s, but there's also a spike in the 1920s, which coincided with America's Exclusionary Innovation Act and a violent renaissance of the KKK. Let's just be blunt. So these, the second generation of these monuments, if you talk about what the public wanted, it's a very, a reserved small group of the public. Right, you were trying to. I thought it was a little interchange is that these statues and monuments are, can be, and maybe they should be a reflection of how people feel at the time. And I'm asking you this question, Charlie. It's okay to pull them down when people really have found that they're not appropriate. So that's a question that I ask my students to think about. And this is something that's being debated, is whether, like, how should we decide the fate of memorials and monuments? Should it just be by allowing mob rule to dictate what comes, goes down? Or should there be a process that is followed to try to decide this, you know, that that does involve the public? So, you know, some people, even some people who are really opposed to the Confederate statues, some of them also think that it's important to have a process to take public input because otherwise, you know, we could remove the Confederate statues and then put up something that you think is more appropriate, but some other mob might come along and take yours down. So, your group statue down. So, yeah, it. What kind of process you're talking about? I mean, we need an act of Congress to put them up or take them down. By the way, Congress isn't enacting anything now. So that would be a big problem. But how much, how much buy-in from the government do we need? How wide does this conversation have to be to put up a statue or take it down? Well, you want to ask that, Charlene, or you want me to jump in? Go ahead, Peter, say something. Okay, so with that, I mean, I think probably if you Google the most significant statue is the one to Robert E. Lee. I think that's the one that's got the most attention. And it's removal, it's final removal is a pretty good exercise to answer your question. It ran through since it is a state and local statue. It's not a federal statue. It ran through local and state governments. And so there were hearings on both sides and the way representative democracy is supposed to work. I guess that was, I'm glad you said that. Like some people, in some states you have a big problem. Right, that's the result. Okay, let me, is there two levels? And there's the local and the federal and they're not the same. So local, if the property and the statue is within a municipality or within a state, it's considered state, if some useful lands are considered state lands, then the process is a very well known legal process. There's a petition, it goes before the board as it did with the Robert E. Lee statue. The board hears from both sides and the board decided the board, the duly elected representatives. So in other words, if people are gonna complain now about the Robert E. Lee statue being taken down, they're essentially the same people on January 6th who can't live with representative government. Okay, that's the local state area. But to answer your question about Congress, actually Congress did do something and President Trump vetoed it. The last defense authorization bill that Congress passed included the renaming of all military bases like Fort Bragg, which are named after Confederate officers. Congress voted for that. The president vetoed it. So there's the example where Congress- What that tells us, Charlene, is that it's political. And that, you know, at the end of the day, it's really not a matter of representative government, it's a matter of political. Congress, Trump, some states this way, some states that way. And so what you get is putting them up as political and taking them down as political. And that enters into the process, doesn't it? But it's not just the politicians that are deciding because politicians do answer to the people. So if the people, if we can see that image again that was shown earlier of the Robert E. Lee statue being put down, I mean, you can see that this monument was refeed and people were expressing their feelings about that. And in the state of Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam, he himself vowed to support racial justice, especially after the incident where he was found to have a yearbook photo where he doesn't say which person he was on his yearbook page, either he's the KKK person dressed up in the white outfit or he's the white person in blackface. He was either one of those two people. And because of all the outcry over that, he vowed to support racial justice and he actually supported the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue. Yeah. So what happens when you have, say, a movement like Black Lives Matter and they're offended by some of these statues and they're having a protest demonstration walking down the street together. They say, gee, let's do graffiti on the statue or worse, let's pull it all down. You don't have any governmental imprimatur on that. They just decide that it doesn't fit for them and they take matters into their own hands. Where does that fit in this continuum? They do risk though. I mean, states have laws against doing that. So they do risk getting arrested for those things. I mean, the facing statues isn't new. There's a burial site in California for Father Junipero Saro who started the mission system and his grave site, they had red paint thrown on it because people you know, because of the way the mission system really led to enslavement of Native people. A lot of people died in the missions. So that's why those protests happen. But when the defacement happened, the news said, oh, that these people, if we find out who they are, they can be arrested. Yeah, but they aren't though. And I mean, I haven't heard of any. And the other thing I wanted to mention is it seems to me there has been a dynamic increase in the amount of defacing that has gone on over recent years where people feel, regardless of the law that might punish them for it, people feel that they should deface this statue because it's not consistent with their belief or their group belief. Here, there's another example. Right. The statue becomes a political icon. Right. The question is why is it happening now? I mean, with social media and, you know, with the rise of Black Lives Matter using social media to protest like the death of George Floyd, the killing of George Floyd, or the Native American activism that's also, you know, like around the Dakota pipeline and all these, it's really with the rise of social media, I think, that people are more aware of these issues during the pandemic, when people went out to protest George Floyd. I mean, they're outside in the public and they're right next to like Robert E. Lee statues and other kinds of things. And people are, and that's the context in which people were starting to protest the memorials because the memorials are standing, you know, they're symbols of colonialism and of slavery, you know, the roots of racism. You know, I know what a statue is, Shirley. I know what a statue is. That's easy. But what is a memorial? Well, I mean, I guess you could call, so a monument or a memorial can take a lot of different forms. So it could be a statue. It could be an obelisk. It could be a mural on a wall. I mean, there's one of President Obama on Ward Avenue, right? It could take, I also consider monuments or memorials to be when we name things after people to remember them. So we have schools in Hawaii, such as McKinley High School, right? That honors a president that supported annexation of Hawaii. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting because I don't know how we rate McKinley. Let's assume for a moment that he was involved in Harvey Weinstein kind of things back there in the 19th century. Only we're not aware. You don't know, we haven't studied McKinley. At the time, it seemed like a good idea because he was the president and he had done some good things, I think for Hawaii and one other thing. But, you know, maybe he did some other things that, you know, through the evaluation you might make today or, you know, not terrific. But we don't know. The public is not aware. And so I'm wondering how many statues, how many memorials get by because they have not become political icon. Because they're there. And, you know, we just don't focus on what their meaning is historically. Are we 98%? Ha! Ha! But in one analogy we can draw as we've talked about it before, is, look, we have a constitution which gets amended or should be amended. And that means that a rethinking of what was originally written down and asking whether that is still relevant today. Now, we, most Americans are willing to do that. A monument or memorial is very similar. A monument or memorial built in 1920 and understood why and how it was built and for what meaning in 1920. And that meaning is now we have a warrant. And the monument goes, the memorial goes. I don't see part of the issue is what to do with it. They are now. So in Britain, with independence in 1947, Indian national government took all the monuments and memorials of the British public to the Raj and put them in one open museum. And if you wanna go there and help the statues, you're welcome to. You wanna go there and worship them, you're welcome to. But it's isolated, not public life. The problem is, I mean, you say that there is an increase in defacing. Well, that ignores a long history of the people who are now complaining who defaced Native American memorials and African American memorials and monuments and nobody seemed to care. So the people who are convention about it are from a long line of not only building and accepting the monuments, but destroying the sacred areas and memorials to the people who now don't like there. So this is a dynamic from the get-go. And everybody who's complaining about pulling down Robert E. Lee ought to take a look at the engravings of the colonists who were rebels and terrorists and tore down the statue of George III. Absolutely, you're making me think of Peter how when I teach about the Americas, how to my students early American history, like pre-colonial, that I explained that when like the Spaniards came in, they actually literally built over the religious site of Native peoples and they would put a church or a right on top. Now that comes from a bit of a Catholic tradition which is to integrate Catholicism and local paganism. So which is not to excuse what they're doing but they did it without any thought, right? Which is not to excuse it, that was just their natural world. And I think, Jay, part of the problem here is are we gonna be historians and are we gonna respect the past or are we going to exploit the past for our own contemporary needs? There is really, what is the need to have the Robert E. Lee statue? Okay, I mean, some people really liked him. The end of the Civil War, he was a gentleman, he surrendered his, he did good work in the field if you like war and he surrendered his sword. See, in fact, that's all wrong. He was actually a poor commander, a poor commander. I mean, this is part, no, but see, this is part of what the problem of the statue is. Okay, Colin, misunderstanding. It's not a misunderstanding. South lost the war, South lost the war. How many great commanders? Napoleon lost Waterloo. That makes him not a great commander. Napoleon lost Russia, Napoleon lost Haiti, Napoleon lost Egypt. He's not a great commander. Robert E. Lee was not a great commander. Peter, if we pull the statue down of every commander who lost the war, we'd be busy all day. But no, we'd be busy pulling down statues of people who are misunderstood as great commanders, not winners or losers. They're funny statues to losers. Okay, it's not winning or losing. Is, are you erected? Because you see what happens with Robert E. Lee. He's a great commander. It is a lost cause. We should have won the war. Why didn't we win the war? Oh, because the Union freed slaves and used slaves as soldiers. We've talked about this before on the show. One of the great tragedies in modern history is countries unwilling to accept defeat and blaming somebody else. Right, France, Lames, Dreyfus, 1871. Hitler and the Nazi. Should we take Robert E. Lee out of the history books? No, he should be understood as for what he was. He was a slave. I want to add something. Yeah, please just jump in. Wait, wait, wait. Go ahead. So when we're thinking about, well, who is memorialized and actually what stories we're not hearing, you know, there's actually, most statues are of men and even men that are, I mean, there are so many men who have statues. And we could argue like Peter's saying that some of them don't deserve their statues. But if we can see slide 10 of the image 10 put up, this is a memorial that was created by Sharon Hayes in Philadelphia. And what she says is that there's far few memorials for women and women leaders. So out of the hundreds of sculptures in Philadelphia, only two are dedicated to women, right? And they're at least half the population, right? They have been half the population. So in her sculpture, she aimed to draw attention to this. So she recreated the bases of nine memorials that celebrate men. And on these bases, she wrote the names of women who have contributed greatly to Philadelphia. And, you know, I would argue that in Hawaii, well, especially relating to war and memorials of war and military service, women are far underrepresented. So if you look at slide eight, we have a new statue at Schofield that was established in 2016. So it's called the Female Combat Soldier and it's a tribute to all women warriors who have served in the US past and present. And this is the fifth statue in the United by Sacrifice Memorial. So when I was curious about whether women soldiers in Hawaii had any kind of, you know, memorial, that's one I found recently. All right, that opens up a whole other category. So let me first respond to Jay. Okay. If you want to have a monument to Robert E. Lee, at least have a monument to Robert E. Lee, which is honest about who Robert E. Lee was. The monuments cannot helpfully contribute to distorting myths. If they do that, then they really must, they must go. Now, Charlie, I'm gonna say what Jay has heard me say every two weeks. There really should be no war memorials or monuments. That in and of itself is a problem. Any war memorial or any war monument just increases militarism, whether it's a woman or not. The notion of warfare and sacrifice and heroism are overly privileged in the world. Yes. And they're institutionalized through war memorials. So I ask my students every semester to share a memorial in their neighborhood community. So one student did share Gandhi's statue, which is near Capulani Park, which I wasn't aware of. Right in front of the zoo. And there's also a peace park at the base of Diamond Head. So we do have some, but I think they're less, yeah, they're less well known than say the Arizona memorial. But they're also not always known as East Memorial. So for example, you go to Gandhi and you may or may not know, and that was actually funded privately. That wasn't built by the city. That had to be funded privately. If you look at the bottom of the freeze. Okay. But the Natatorium supports the World War I memorial. And Jay's gonna sneer at me because I always, I mean, I think one of the great evils we have is militarism. Well, I think of that point, Peter, you know, the reason a lot of these, I'm not advocating for these particular memorials, but I'm trying to see them through the eyes of the people who were there, who allowed them to happen or funded them or voted for them, whatever it is, that made the community elect them. And they were saying, look, we lost a lot of people in the war. They died, you know, I mean, for example, there's a Vietnam right near the Capitol, you know what I mean? Richard Street is a Vietnam memorial. You know, that was done in relatively recent. And that was very controversial because it, where the two Vietnam memorials actually, there's a new one which includes women and the statues of women who served in Vietnam. Well, we're not getting to gender, you know, that's a memorial. Oh, but I'm gonna ask you a question. I'm gonna ask you a question. To respect the people who fell, to respect the people who from Hawaii who went, and I'm sure that, you know, this exists for the 442nd as well, who gave their lives for the cause. So a war memorial doesn't celebrate the war as much as the people who regrettably lost their lives in the war. It's not the same thing. And I don't know how you, I don't know how you get through that and have all these people who died and not pay homage with a memorial of some kind. Charlene? Well, I guess, you know, I was thinking about my, how do I as a historian feel about memorials and monuments? And honestly, I'm not really comfortable with them because I feel like they give us a very narrow piece of history. It's very easy to oversimplify and maybe it's easy for the public to wanna just celebrate people they think are heroes. And it's much harder to look at people in, maybe it's harder to even face what you consider the villains of society. And maybe I'm just more comfortable with books. And maybe there shouldn't be so many memorials, but I have a slide that, so if we could see slide 13 talking about Vietnam, there's something called a counter memorial. And it's a memorial that's designed not to impose any meaning on the viewer. So you can see it just has all the names of all the veterans, I guess. I guess we're lost in this war. And you can see people's reflection. So the viewer sees themselves reflected back from this. So this is another type of memorial. And one of my question about it is, do you think it's effective or not? I've studied that memorial a lot. I mean, I can tell you about the history of it. And the history of that memorial reveals in good part why there are problems with war memorials with all due respect to Jay. It's designed by Maya Lin with architecture students. So first of all, there were attacks on her for being an Asian woman. An Asian woman shouldn't be too hard. And that's a very revealing comment, right? Like, do you think the robbery, do you think the robbery- You raised the question of the text. No, well, great. Right, but that's what part of the war was, though. Part of the war was whites, and Australia, America, fighting Asians. That's one of the realities of that war. Okay, would you, do you think the Virginia folks in 1920 asked a black man to carve the Robert E. Lee statue? Do you think if a black man had presented? So that originally tells you that the building of a statue or the building memorial regardless is already a divisive issue from the get. Then she was accused of scarring the landscape, meaning that that monument was not an appropriate architectural form, that the architectural form should be what most of them are, hero worship. All right, then there were discussions about the fact that you do see yourself. So veterans, some veterans now that's mellowed out, but some veterans resented that thinking of Henry V. We are a band of brothers and only we veterans really know the suffering and only we veterans really know what it means to die in war. You know, the TV show Band of Brothers, that's taken from Henry V. Shakespeare's speech before the Battle of Agincourt. So this is a really good example of them. Glad Charlene brought it up. What I can't say, because I'm not entirely negative, is that now it is accepted. And now veterans and families go, and what they do is they literally, which you're not accustomed to with other statues, is the idea of touching it. You touch the name you know. So I reach out and I touch Sarah Smith nurse, and I can make a connection. Okay, so what Maya Lin is doing is saying let's make the connection a humanist and humanitarian connection. Let's not make the connection based on race. Let's not make the connection based upon the fact that the war was devised. Okay, now that's a very different approach. Yes it is, and I wanna point out and ask for our leaders who followed this. You know, when we see Robert E. Lee and actually statues up to that point and beyond, they're people on horses or in idyllic circumstances, and they tried to represent the reality of the individual. Maybe they were even- I don't think they tried to represent reality. Yeah, I mean you're idealized. Well, they are individuals who are represented in the material, whatever it is, bronze or marble or what have you. But now we look at the Vietnam Memorial and some of these other memorials and statues and we see that there's art there. There's a philosophical analysis there. There's an attempt to see it in broader terms to make a statement beyond hero worship as Peter calls it. And these are really artistic and architectural project that are meant to make a statement on into the future. They are meant to tell a story to future generation. And this story is more complex than Robert Lee on a horse. Am I right? The way this is going, it's changing. There is a dynamic in all of these statues and memorials that are being built now today. Am I right? Yes or no? So if you're interested in looking at new monuments that have been publicly vetted and made with public input, you can go to Monument Labs website, which is started by two University of Pennsylvania professors who were interested in this topic. And going back, I know our time's almost up, but going back to the McKinley statue, in Hawaii we don't have people as of yet that I know of carrying statues down. However, there is pushback against the colonialist history of Hawaii, writing of the colonialist perspective on Hawaii history and an effort to remember and to revive some of the Hawaiian monuments that were suppressed by missionaries. So one example, if we can go to slide 12, this is an animated version of the monument. But, and so this animation is going to be coming out soon but this one remembers and recognizes the healer stones of Kapai Matu and which translates to the row of mahu. So those four stones stand for mahu, right? Dual male and female spirited people. But, and they were said to have brought the healing arts from Tahiti to Hawaii. Okay, so this is not really known, probably except maybe around some people who are deep into native Hawaiian history and culture. But, and also even in, like I said, naming is another way to memorialize things. And a lot of you have heard of Cocoa Head, right? But Cocoa Head has another name that Hawaiians use prior to the missionaries, Protestant missionaries calling it Cocoa Head. So they used to call it, I don't know if I'm saying this correctly, but Hohele Pelepe. And that means the fringe vulva. Okay, but it was probably too sexual for the missionaries, right? This is a, this is a family show show, right? And I'm blushing. So if there's few memorials to women, there's even fewer relating to LGBTQ issues and sexuality in Hawaii, and probably in the United States in general. Well, it seems to me, as I said before, this is a reflection of a political environment. And we have a political environment where people feel free and are free to disagree about things. And it seems to me that that makes it more difficult to select a statue where everyone agrees this statue should be up there. And likewise, I think that the architectural community, the art community should have a say. They should be involved in every statue because it's part of our quality of life. It's part of our outdoor experience, our community experience and public places. It's a statement of the, it defines our public places. So we have to be careful that it represents how the public feels about the issue of the person and how the public will enjoy the issue when the person embodied in that statue or memorial going forward. So this is actually, I see this as very dynamic. I see it as a good thing that you're studying this and teaching about it and collecting information about it because it's a great way for the community. Listen to this as a conclusion. It's a great way for the community to come together on its true values. Because this is a statement of the values adopted by that community. They'd be different than the next community. But I think we have learned over the past few years that it's incumbent on us to try to do that. So your thoughts, Charlene, your last thoughts because they're running out of time. I usually wrap up with my students and I ask them, what kind of memorials do you think future generations are gonna make about us? And what kind of memorial do you want, how do you wanna be remembered? Whether it's on your tombstone, if you have one or most people are cremated nowadays, but whatever it is, what words do you wanna attribute it to you or what sayings attributed to you? So, it's a great thought. You can design your own statue and you gotta see if anybody will put up the money for it. Or deface it. Okay, Peter, it's your turn to give us a profound summary of what we've been talking about and what Charlene has been delivering today and what you've been delivering today. All right, well, first of all, Charlene, thank you very much. Not just for the comments, but I think a very helpful example. Because when we're talking about my name it's memorials, you can get very abstract. So having those concrete images. I will not be profound, I never am, but let me end in the Talmudic tradition of ending with questions. I think that's more helpful. And I think the conversation has raised at least two very profound questions, which is what is the purpose of a memorial or a monument? And is that purpose one of us originally built are relevant to a society that has changed? And that is a difference between a mythological, continuous sense of the past and the sense of the passage in a democracy is dynamic and changing. And so I will apologize for being repetitive, but I think there's an analogy with the constitution. And most people have read the constitution while founded by probably mostly dead white men now with a particular interest. They even recognize the need to change. Okay, secondly, I would sense, and I think Jay, you make a very important point, a part of a democracy is negotiating what public interest is. And I like your phrase to public space, but what the public space really is, is what is the common good? What is the public interest? And I think we might rethink as a society, a 21st century society, why we need monuments from memorials in public spaces. What are they telling us about the public? And you and I can go on and on in this life and the afterlife, but you are never gonna convince me that there is a benign role, a war memorial. You knock a benign role to a war memorial. A war memorial in public. Peter, Peter, you've made that point, and I heard Charlene, us now, she might wanna add to that. What do you think about that, Charlene? I just wanna add that, although we haven't had people tearing down memorials in Hawaii, we have had memorials renamed or changed. So if we could just show slide seven, this is Central Intermediate School, which it's recently been announced, I think just this past month, that it's going to be renamed after Princess Ruth K.A. Lee Kolani. And Princess Ruth owned the property on which the campus sits, and she left most of her property to Bernice Pawahi, who's a state, started the Bishop Museum and Meimea Schools. But back in the day when... On the land of Akadno. Yes. Right, but back in the day when the school was, it was originally named after her, but people at the time said it was too hard to say her name. So they switched it to Central Intermediate. But in this new context in which people are with a revival of native Hawaiian language, right? And history, the name has been restored now. And currently this past year, there was a petition to take McKinley statue down and to rename the high school, but that bill died in the legislature. But that is an ongoing issue with that school. Two quick non-profound points, but might be interesting to your viewers. The idea of the counter-memorial, or counter-memorial, started of all places in Germany, where there was a physical monument above ground, but it was lined with a soft material that you could write your comments about World War II and the Holocaust. And slowly but surely, that monument sank into the ground. So the idea was, okay, you wanna express yourself? Express yourself. But that expression is not cemented into a physical monument. So that's the notion of a counter-minement or a counter-memorial. And that exists in a, it's a relatively small German town. Secondly, if your viewers can stand 15 more minutes of video. I wanna say it's very slowly, so folks are interested. There is really a very informative, balanced video produced by the Museum of Natural History in New York on the Upper West Side over the debate about Teddy Roosevelt Monuments Memorial. And those of you who have the good pleasure of going to Zabars and then moving up the road to the Museum will note that as you say, Jay, Roosevelt is on a horseback. It's a long tradition, right? From the ancient Greeks and Romans through the Baroque. And that's not an unintended comment, right? A great leader controls a horse like a great leader controls men and women on each side of Roosevelt. One is the statue of the representative of Native American and one is the statue of the representative of Africa. So I'll leave everybody with the question, what should the museum do about that statue? Including the option of doing nothing but the raising of the question. And if you Google, it's an excellent, especially for students, superb brief video which talks about what to do with that controversial statue of more than just an environmentalist. Teddy Roosevelt was much more than just an environmentalist. Okay, so thank you very much. I know we're out of time. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. Very nice discussion. Thank you for all your slides and photographs and references. It's been really interesting. Aloha. Aloha.