Opinion: The big problem with America’s monuments

Editor’s Note: Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, scholar and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – the largest funder of arts, culture and humanities in the nation. CNN — Last fall, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the Monuments Project, a $250 million initiative to better understand and improve America’s commemorative landscape – the monuments, statues and memorials across the country that tell our collective history. Then, they created a representative study set of nearly 50,000 monuments to examine how our commemorative landscape has grown and changed since the country’s founding. The takeaway of this remarkable work is unmistakable and sobering: Too many of our country’s monuments misrepresent our collective history, silence our many different voices, and distort who we are as a nation. Yet, despite the widespread displacement and extermination of American Indian populations after the arrival of Europeans, only four monuments identified in the study set memorialize the massacre of Native Americans by Whites.