The Capitol Dome

THE CAPITOL DOME 5 she began writing poetry that criticized the OIA. In 1930, she lived in Los Angeles, but by the middle of the decade she had moved across the country to Washington, DC. 15 After a short stay there, she moved back to California and became active in several Native political organizations, including serving as one of the founding members of the Los Angeles branch of the National Congress of American Indians. 16 Smart outlined her critiques of the Capitol statue groups most clearly in a letter to the National Sculpture Society in 1953 and expanded on these ideas in an open letter entitled "e Last Rescue," published in Harper's in 1959. To the Na- tional Sculpture Society she wrote, "e American Indian is no longer,—if he ever was, the blood-thirsty savage Greenough made him out to be in this group of sculpture . . . we feel we ought to rescue the Indians from these deplorable straits." 17 In Harper's she asserted that the "whole thing gives a very unflat- tering and unjust impression of the American Indian, who was better known for his acts of kindness to the early settlers than for his savagery." Across the staircase she noted "the unfor- tunate Indian woman . . . stands there looking up at Colum- bus in awe or wonderment, or possibly worry." She concluded, after looking "at the statue from the rear," that "it must be worry; she was about to lose what little clothing she wore!" 18 Her criticisms focused on the violence portrayed and implied by the statues—physical violence, sexual violence, the violence of historical abstraction, of conquest, and of continued settler colonialism. Smart also circulated and submitted petitions to Congress, as only a legislative act could remove the sculptures. In the peti- tion she tempered her language, writing that the statues were intended from the outset only to serve as "period pieces," but their prominent position on the Capitol stairs was "misleading to the general public in that they fail to portray the true char- acter of the American Indian." e petition suggested that the statues be moved to a museum where they could be preserved and protected from climate changes and precipitation, which had taken its toll on the soft Seravezza marble, and that a commission be established to conduct a contest for new designs with the winners to be sculpted and placed on the cheek blocks. 19 ere were a few earlier attempts to move or remove the statue groups. In 1850 the congressional Joint Committee on the Library—the committee responsible for decisions related to the art and architecture of the Capitol complex—discussed moving e Discovery away from the stairs to "a suitable place in some one of the public squares," but the reasoning behind their discussion is not clear. It might have been because Gre- enough's corresponding statue group was delayed (it wouldn't be placed until 1853). In 1939, Clark Burdick, a congressman from Rhode Island, introduced a joint resolution to the House Fig. 5. View showing Discovery group being safely removed from the upper south cheek block of the central steps on Nov. 25, 1958. Fig. 4. e Discovery on upper south cheek block. ARCHI T EC T OF T HE C API TOL ARCHI T EC T OF T HE C API TOL

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