**GSA PANEL ON ARIEL RIOS MURALS**

**MONDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2006, 9:30 A.M. - NOON**

**THE RONALD REAGAN BUILDING**

**WASHINGTON, D.C.**

**PARTICIPANTS:**

**MARY CASE**, CO-FOUNDER,

QUALITY MANAGEMENT TO A HIGHER POWER

**RAYNA GREEN**, PHD,

CURATOR, DIRECTOR, AMERICAN INDIAN PROGRAM,

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY

**HILDE HEIN**, PHD,

VISITING SCHOLAR, BRANDEIS WOMEN'S STUDIES RESEARCH CENTER

**CONNIE W. KIEFFER**, EDD,

ART EDUCATOR

**B. BYRON PRICE**,

CHARLES MARION RUSSELL MEMORIAL CHAIR,

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

**PAUL CHAAT SMITH**, ASSOCIATE CURATOR,

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION,

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

**SHARYN UDALL**, PHD,

ART HISTORIAN

**ROBERT WEINSTEIN**,

PRINCIPAL AND CO-FOUNDER,

ARCHITRAVE P.C., ARCHITECTS

**GARY L. PORTER**

ACTING REGIONAL HISTORIC PRESERVATION OFFICER

GSA NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION

*Transcript by:*

*Federal News Service*

*Washington, D.C.*

BART BUSH: Good morning, everyone. Welcome. Thank you all for coming. My
name is Bart Bush, and I'm the assistant regional administrator for the
National Capital Region for Public Building Service, GSA. We are here
today to join in what we hope will be a meaningful and informative
discussion and dialogue about several murals at the Ariel Rios Federal
Building. On behalf of the U.S. General Services Administration, GSA, we
appreciate the fact that you have taken the time to be here today, and
we look forward to the next couple hours of discussion.

But first I want to introduce GSA as the federal agency responsible for
stewardship of the murals and give you a brief background about GSA's
fine arts collection. GSA provides a full range of real estate services,
real estate acquisition and disposal, property management, construction
and repairs, security services, and overall portfolio management. The
public building service is the largest public real estate organization
in the country and has an inventory of over 342 million square feet of
workspace for over a million federal employees in 2100 American
communities.

Just within the National Capital Region over 300,000 clients count on
GSA to deliver world-class work environments and to support their
agency's workforce and missions. Here in the metropolitan D.C. area, GSA
provides federal employees with over 90 million square feet of space and
151 federally owned buildings, including 70 historic buildings of which
seven are national landmarks, and 500 lease locations.

GSA's fine arts collection of more than 18,000 works dates back more
than 150 years. The works are in federal and other buildings across the
country. Consisting of various styles and materials, the majority of art
work, whether it be monumental sculpture, or large-scale murals has been
and continues to be specifically commissioned and integrated into the
buildings during the time of design and construction.

This is true of the works of art at the Ariel Rios Federal Building.
They were announced March 1^st^, 1935, as the first national project to
embellish the building with romantic subject matter in the history of
the post office. The building originally functioned for the Post Office
Department and is currently the home of the Environmental Protection
Agency.

Today the murals are the focus of this public forum, which has been
organized to listen and to learn from each other in the spirit of
fostering appropriate civil discourse, reflective of our democratic
values. They have brought us together to give you a voice, the public.
Whatever your professional expertise or personal opinions are, we
welcome your thoughts and views, and consider all of them important to
this process.

I would like to thank those of you who have come from the public today.
I would like to thank our panelists who have taken time from their busy
schedule to share their points of view. I would like to introduce our
moderator for the day, Mary Case to start our program. Mary is a
Washingtonian, a consultant who has worked on arts, cultural issues for
25 years, particularly issues of change, leadership, and conflict
resolution. Thank you very much for being with us this morning. Mary,
please join us.

(Applause.)

MARY CASE: Good morning.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

MS. CASE: Good morning!

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

MS. CASE: I gave you coffee. (Applause.)

I'm privileged to be with you this morning to engage in one of the most
powerful of all human activities, the act of listening. We have an
unusual opportunity here as we have many points of view, some of them
quite divergent. We are privileged, too, because everyone in the country
has a stake in what we do here today. First of all, the people of the
nation paid of the Ariel Rios Building, and the 25 murals commissioned
in the 1930s to tell the story of the U.S. Postal Service, which at the
time occupied the building. The American taxpayers have continued to pay
for the building's maintenance and for the conservation and care of the
murals for more than 80 years.

So with our simple, powerful act of listening today, we are tied to our
grandfathers and mothers, and in this traditional way, despite the
barriers of entry \-- the distant for some, the difficulty of leave time
for your jobs, even the security issues of getting to this building
today \-- in this traditional human act of listening to one another, we
are tied to our grandparents, our children and to their children.

Six of the murals in the Ariel Rios Building are now contested because
of their content by the employees who work in Ariel Rios and some
visitors to the building. This contestation is the narrow subject of our
discussion today. The much broader subjects of our discussion include:

-   Identity,

-   Stereotypes,

-   Censorship,

-   Aesthetic and historic integrity,

-   The idea that art and monuments deserve our protection,

-   The nature of change and the veracity of the historical record over
    time,

-   The idea that respect means different things to different people,

-   And that a single individual in the American democracy does have the
    right and the responsibility to voice his or her opinion.

And sometimes we are privileged to listen. Today we will listen as part
of the 106 process.

The process we are engaged in has a number, as all things in a
bureaucracy. As it turns out, this is a very good number to know -- 106.
This process is a formal, prescribed way for the government to listen to
its citizens. Mr. Gary Porter, the person who is managing this process,
who has convened this panel, will explain the 106 process to us in a
moment.

As part of the 106 process, under Mr. Porter's direction, I have created
a panel intended to bring in a variety of voices: a philosopher, an arts
educator, art historians, curators, and historians with different
specialties in aspects of art, identity, and culture. Two members of our
panel are themselves Native Americans. Each member of the panel is
highly qualified to speak to you about the subject at hand. You have got
the shortest snippet of a biography as a handout. I hope everybody was
able to pick up a copy of that on his or her way in. If not, we will be
happy to provide that to you.

I'm going to introduce each panelist in a moment. In addition, we will
get a short explanation about where we are in the Federal Triangle
complex from Mr. Robert Weinstein, a historic architect. All comments
made today \-- mine, yours, the panel members \-- will be taped. The
tapes will be transcribed. The transcripts will be posted on the GSA
website. We are scheduled to end today at 11:30. If we need to, we can
go until 12:00.

I am fearful that we won't get to everyone's comments today. Those of
you who would like to make comments and for whatever reason are unable
to come to the podium, are welcome and encouraged to send your comments
to Mr. Porter, and those comments will become part of the historical
record.

If you would like to make comments today, we have a form you can fill
out,after the panel, and during the break so we can organize people
coming up to the podium or speaking from the microphone, whichever you
feels comfortable. We do have to have you speak from the mic so we can
tape. If you will fill out one of these at the break, we will organize
together. We will have a little huddle, and we'll figure out how to make
those comments happen.

We also have other wonderful handouts that have been prepared,
geographical and historical context for the murals at Ariel Rios and
material prepared by Mr. Weinstein.

I'm going to introduce both Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Porter. Mr. Weinstein
will speak first, and then Mr. Porter will talk about the 106. Robert
Weinstein is the co-founder of Architrave Architects. For over 30 years,
he and his firm have concentrated primarily on preserving historic
buildings in and around the Washington, D.C., area. He will provide a
brief overview and historical context of the Ariel Rios building, and
the murals.

Gary Porter is the acting historic preservation officer here in the
National Capital Region. He is responsible for the process we are
engaged in. He will provide us with an explanation of the 106 process in
general, where we are in this process in particular, and where we are
going. At the end, Mr. Porter will come back and he will tell us
specifically about the next steps in the process, after we have had the
panel and your comments from the public. So, Mr. Weinstein.

ROBERT A. WEINSTEIN: Thank you, Mary, and good morning, everyone. Did
everybody get one of these handouts? Does everybody have one of these?
Or if you don't, if maybe somebody is next you, you can share with them
because the little pictures here are important to understanding what I'm
about to say.

I'm going to provide a very brief introduction to the Federal Triangle,
what it is, where it is, it's architecture and the murals. If you would
look at your handout and flip past the cover page, what you'll see is,
of course, a little map of Washington, D.C., and a little red triangle,
which is, indeed, the Federal Triangle. Some people haven't realized
this, but it is a triangle for which Pennsylvania Avenue, the ceremonial
parade route between the United States Capitol and the White House is
the hypotenuse. Along the base is Constitution Avenue. It faces onto the
Smithsonian buildings and the Mall. On the Western end, 15^th^ Street,
bordering on, again, the Ellipse and the Commerce Building.

So we then we have an enlarged view of the Federal Triangle. And one of
the things you'll notice is all of the red roofs of those buildings, and
then an enlarged view of the Ariel Rios Building, which is an integral
piece of the Federal Triangle.

The next page is a simple map showing nine out of the 10 buildings of
the triangle, listing their dates of construction and their architects.
The 10^th^ building, which completed the Federal Triangle, is the one
that we are in today, the Ronald Reagan Building.

The following page, which is just a little collage of photographs. On
this page, I hope you'll see the really extraordinary collection of
classical revival structures, rich in elaborate detail. Seven of the
buildings, including the Ariel Rios Building, and if you'll flip to the
next page, you'll see pictures from the Ariel Rios Building, (formally
known as the New Post Office Department were built in a period between
1926 and 1938. They all housed major governmental agencies.

Following the picture pages, there is a timeline. The timeline has some
things in boldface and other things in regular text. And the boldfaced
items are events which are particularly about the murals and how they
came to be and why. The other things establish what was going on in the
country or in the world to give you a sense of the time period.
Basically it's the New Deal era.

The McMillon Commission plan, which was developed in 1901, 1902 was
largely influenced by the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the City
Beautiful Movement. That laid the groundwork for the Federal Triangle, a
collection of distinguished office buildings that would assert the power
and permanence of the government. This is really the building of our
nation's capital.

The Buildings Act in 1926 set in motion plans for the Federal Triangle,
a development of 6-million-square feet on a 70-acre site. Then Secretary
of Treasury, Andrew W. Mellon, and a distinguished board of
architectural consultants headed by Edward Bennett developed design
guidelines for the site. The buildings were to have a harmonious
monumental overall design, expressive of the dignity and the authority
of the federal government. Limestone facades, red-tile hip roofs,
classically inspired colonnades are common features of the Federal
Triangle Buildings.

The Ariel Rios building was designed by the architectural firm, Delano
and Aldrich, and constructed between 1931 and 1935 to be the
headquarters for the U.S. Post Office Department. It was intended to be
the central feature of the Federal Triangle. The building has two
seven-story, spiral marble staircases on its interior. The murals we are
speaking about today are in lobbies directly off of these monumental
staircases. Art is an integral component of both the exterior and the
interior of the buildings of the Federal Triangle.

In 1934, as part of the New Deal, the section of painting and sculpture
was established to secure suitable art of the best quality available for
the embellishment of public buildings. This is early New Deal. In 1935,
the section announced the first national project to embellish the Post
Office Department with, as Bart had said, romantic subject matter in the
history of the Post. This was a competition. From 1935 to 1938, 25
murals were created for the newly constructed Post Office Department.
Six of these are the subject of today's discussion.

In 1949, the federal property administrative act transferred all of the
functions of the federal works agencies, which included this New Deal
artwork to GSA. In 1966, Congress passed the National Historic
Preservation Act, and designated the Pennsylvania Avenue National
Historic site, which includes the Federal Triangle. GSA therefore became
responsible for the stewardship of the historic buildings and their
preservation and conservation. If there were to be a proposed change in
any character-defining element of any of these designated buildings, a
Section 106 process must follow.

And now Gary will explain to you more about what that process is. Thank
you.

(Applause.)

GARY L. PORTER: Good morning, everyone. I'm Gary Porter with GSA, and
I'm managing the Section 106 consultation for the Ariel Rios Murals.
I'll take just a few minutes to briefly describe the Section 106 process
that GSA has undertaken on the murals. Following that, I'll talk about
where we are in the process, and then I'll follow up with the purpose of
today's forum.

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as Robert
described, requires that federal agencies take into account the effects
of their undertakings on historic properties. As you now know, the Ariel
Rios Building is considered an historic building and is listed on the
National Register of Historic Places. Any program or project undertaken
by GSA that has an effect on historically significant elements of the
Ariel Rios building requires a Section 106 review.

Some people have asked the question: at this moment, GSA doesn't really
have an undertaking on how to address the murals, but the 106 process
can also be used as a planning tool, and that is how we are applying 106
at this point in the process, to understand, to solicit public comment
and expert testimony or comment, so GSA can be fully informed, and aware
for any kind of decision making that we will undertake.

An important element of the Section 106 review process is the inclusion
of members of the public in the discussions, on the effects a particular
project will have. Participants in the consultation on the Ariel Rios
Building typically include the D.C. Historic Preservation Office, the
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and members of the public,
also known as consulting parties.

Consulting parties for the mural consultation include the National
Congress of the American Indians, the Society of American Indian
Government Employees, also known as SIAGE, and the Lawyers Committee of
Civil Rights Under Law. This group actually is representing a number of
EPA employees who have sought to have legal counsel for their position.
Mike and Dorik Mechau, sons of the muralist, Frank Mechau, and other
federal employees who have expressed an interest in the project.

The consultation on the six Ariel Rios murals is intended to address
objections raised by visitors and federal employees at the Ariel Rios
Building on the appropriateness of the murals, including complaints that
the murals stereotype Native Americans, and that they contain images
inappropriate for the workplace. The six murals include:

-   "French Huguenot in Florida," by Karl Free;

-   "Opening of the Southwest," by Ward Lockwood;

-   "Consolidation of the West" by Ward Lockwood;

-   "Pony Express" Frank Mechau;

-   "Dangers of the Mail," by Frank Mechau;

-   "Covered Wagons Attacked by Indians," by William Palmer.

I would like to briefly give you the history of the consultation to date
and where we will be going with that consultation. The consultation was
initiated in May of 2005 with a letter to the D.C. State Historic
Preservation Office. The first consulting party meeting was June of
2005. At that meeting, we discussed the use of a website to help
facilitate public comment and the sharing of ideas and gathering of
information. That website was posted in October of 2005, and immediately
after that, we started a public comment period that ran for 60 days, and
concluded on December 31^st^, 2005. Today we have received over 400
comments as a result of the website being posted.

In May of 2006, I completed a summary of the comments and posted that on
the website, which has led us to where we are today, October 30^th^, for
the public forum. Following the forum, we will -- as Mary described, the
forum will be transcribed and placed on the website. That will initiate
a second comment period. We anticipate getting the transcript will take
about two weeks to post, and we would like to complete the second
comment period by December 31^st^ of '06, which would give us
approximately 45 days of opportunity for comment.

Following that, I'll again do a summary of the comments and a report on
the consultation that I will give to GSA's regional administrator. At
that point, GSA should have sufficient information to make a decision on
the murals.

I would now like to state the purpose of the forum. For today's forum,
we have assembled six panelists that will discuss the murals, and the
artistic and cultural issues that are relevant to the controversy. The
primary reason for the forum was to generate a discussion that could be
shared with members of the public that have not had the benefit of
hearing a discourse on the murals, other than what has been posted on
the website to date.

It was GSA's intention to create such a discourse by assembling today's
panel and posting the discussion on the mural website. In addition to
the panel discussion on the murals, we will also post comments received
from the audience, as well as comments from the consulting parties in an
attempt to create a balance of ideas that is inclusive of many
perspectives.

I would like to close my comments by emphasizing that while the Section
106 process is a regulatory requirement for federal agencies, it is a
beneficial and effective tool for GSA to hear and understand public
views. We use it quite often very successfully on a variety of issues. I
want to thank everyone for coming today and being willing to speak and
participate. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MS. CASE: I wonder if the panel would now come up? As we have
alphabetical streets in Washington, I wonder if the panel will come up
and sit alphabetically with Ranya Green closest to me here, and then the
rest of you arrayed -- (chuckles). And if you wonder what you are,
alphabetically, you are alphabetically according to the bios we have
created. It's Rayna, it's Hilde Hein, it's Connie Kieffer, it's Mr.
Byron Price, Paul Chaat Smith, and Sharyn Udall, in that order.

Rayna then Hilde -- you're going to sit here. Then Connie Kieffer, Mr.
Price, Mr. Smith, Ms. Udall. I am actually not going to sit up on the
panel. I'm going to sit down here and ruthlessly keep time for them.
They can see this (2 minutes sign) -- they can see this (0 minute sign)
-- (laughter) -- and if they see this (OFF sign), it's really bad. So
let me introduce you to the panel please. It is my pleasure to introduce
you.

First speaking will be Dr. Rayna Green, curator and director of the
American Indian Program at the National Museum of American History. She
has been writing and thinking about identity and how it changes over
time for at least two decades in my own personal knowledge.

Second, we will hear from Dr. Hilde Hein, professor emeritus of
philosophy, at the Holy Cross College, and author, this year, of a book
called "Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently."

Connie Kieffer is an arts educator who has spent part of her illustrious
career working on new-deal murals in Highland Park High School in
Chicago.

Byron Price understands art of the American West as well as anyone in
the country today. I'm particularly grateful to him for bringing this
perspective to us.

Paul Chaat Smith is associate curator of the National Museum of American
Indian. One of the topics he thinks and writes about is cultural
politics, and perhaps we will hear something along that line from him.

Sharyn Udall brings the considered sensibility of an art historian who
understands the American Southwest. She understands deeply the art of
the Southwest, its people, its geography, and its history.

I'm asking each of you to respond to the fact that objections have been
raised by the visitors and federal employees of the Ariel Rios building,
about the appropriateness of six murals, including complaints that the
murals stereotype Native Americans, and that they contain images that
are inappropriate for the workplace. The murals are located in elevator
lobbies and on upper floors through which agency employees and visitors
pass, as we saw last night. We had a tour.

However, these murals are integral to the historic fabric of the
building, and are part of a collection of 1930s New Deal Art that
embellishes the buildings of the Federal Triangle, as we have heard.
They are commissioned to adorn and enhance the architecture, paid for
with public funds, and belong to the American people. They depict the
historic and cultural ideals of the country at the time they were
created.

You each come to the issues with a rich and varied background, personal,
professional, and intellectual. Will you provide us with your insights
on these apparently conflicting points of view? Rayna, will you start?

MS. GREEN: In the last 20 years, I should say, as a public servant, as a
curator, and as a social scientist who has studied, as Mary said, not
only American identity, but I have devoted a lot of special attention to
the images and representations of American Indians, and even more
particularly to images and representations of American-Indian women.

So I have been on the firing line from both ends as a museum person
whose business it is to exhibit and care for all sorts of art, but with
those considerations in mind, the kind of things that have interested
me. I have sort of been on both the receiving and shooting end of issues
that arise with the display of certain artifacts in art. I have lived in
the middle of the debates, over the repatriation not only of ancestral
remains but also of culturally significant property. I have been in the
middle of the debates over intellectual property and who owns the rights
to the display of certain objects and images.

So I have been there in the center of it. I have been at the center and
involved in all of the critiques and confusions that have initiated at
the Smithsonian from the display of art very much like we see in the
Ariel Rios Building. Some of you who have been in this town may remember
the controversies that ensued after the American Art Museum's display of
paintings in the West as America, and the interpretation of those
paintings, which are absolutely relevant to the discussion here today.
So, been there, and -- like I said, on both ends. And sometimes these
discussions -- it really does depend on which end of the gun you are on
as to what conclusions arise from the discussions.

These particular paintings are certainly of interest to me. But I have
to put them in context of the rest of the entire town of Washington. I
would like to say that if we really want to consider these paintings in
the context of what you see in Washington in general, the entire town is
a hostile work environment. (Laughter.)

If you would like to go up to the U.S. Capitol and visit the rotunda of
the Capitol, you will see sculptural works, you will see paintings, you
will see friezes carved into the wall that represent the official
mythologies of the history of the United States. You will see from fore
to aft, Pocahontas saving Captain John Smith. You will see the first
Thanksgiving. You will see Columbus landing in America. You name it;
it's all there. You will see Indians robbing stagecoaches and massacring
people.

You will see Custer's last stand, which by the way -- Pocahontas saving
Captain John Smith and Custer's last stand in the 19^th^ century were
the two most numerous representations of U.S. history in the whole
country. They were hung everywhere and in various forms, paintings,
sculptures, whatever, in various forms all over the country, including
-- they were Custer's last stand and various versions of it were the
favorite in bars across America. So you can see that, you know,
everywhere from the U.S. rotunda to a nice saloon out in Denver -- you
could see these mythologies.

And I call them mythologies. They are essentially the collective
founding mythologies of American history that were mostly -- most people
don't know this -- mostly invented in the latter part of the 19^th^
century. They had not been in existence since time immemorial since the
16^th^ century when these things started putatively to take place. They
represent mythologies in that they simply represent the winning sides'
version of how American history goes down.

And in fact, almost all of them didn't happen. They are not good
representations of history, neither are the murals in the Ariel Rios
Building. They represent a kind of collective mythology that everybody
learned in schoolbooks, and this was the mythology that was
commissioned. It's commissioned all over town, and it bears no
resemblance to good history.

So we have that problem. We also have the problem that the particular
ways in which many of these things are represented in their artistic
styles; they are reiterations of paintings and sculptures of the past.
So you see, they just carry the inherited baggage of one painting from
200 years ago, or one sculpture from 200 years ago, some of which were
about Greek and Roman life, by the way, or they were 19^th^ century
French historical representations of Roman history, and these paintings
reiterate some of those things.

They also carry the clichés, the popular clichés of the time. Many of
the paintings in the Rios Building, as do other works all over town,
carry whatever was popular at the time in art, particularly Southwestern
art, so you get the bison skull or the cattle skull, you get all sorts
of things that are simply -- well, let me put it this way: simply
ordinary. And for me, these paintings are remarkable -- not -- most of
them -- I reserve a little bit of concern about the Mechau paintings.
They are different in some ways. Most of them are not remarkable for
their remarkability, but for their ordinariness. They are just simply
common, and as such, you know, should have a whole different historical
sensibility brought to them.

As Mary is giving me the hook, one final comment; that is just simply to
put these paintings in the context in which they exist. What to do with
them is a whole other thing. The one thing I know is that my job as a
public servant is to explain the stuff we put up for the public. And
that means explaining even the controversies, explaining the
inaccuracies, explaining the ways in which the art we have commissioned
and displayed deviates from historical truth, deviates from historical
norms, or deviates from the way in which people bring their opinion to
it.

And so I think to question them in whatever way we can bring our
questioning of them to the floor is nothing but good. Past experience
indicates to me, though, that whenever we do that, we are going to get
the assault from the other end. Anytime in this town, at least, in which
we have put up something that questions, or we interpret something that
questions the conventional mythology, assaults it, we are going to get
it assaulted back and probably taken down. I have never seen any work
that has questioned authority and conventional authority in this town
stay up for very long. Usually the method is to withdraw public funds
from that exhibition.

So we do have a problem in the way we treat such art; we do have a
problem in the way we question it, but I do think we have an absolute
obligation to do so, and that can take many forms.

MS. CASE: Thank you, Rayna.

(Applause.)

HILDE HEIN: Can you hear me if I speak through this? Okay. I would like
to begin by calling attention to one of the inscriptions in the federal
building: *What is past is prologue*. We are part of that history. That
history includes not only what is past, but also the current discussion
of it, and the possible, I don't want to say revision, but
reconsideration of it.

So I want to begin by just briefly saying that the WPA program was
fundamentally intended to provide work for unemployed artists, and it
was explicitly socially progressive. I think quite consciously so with
respect to Blacks, less so with women, and I think not at all when it
comes to Indians. I can say from my own experience growing up in that
period that we played cowboys and Indians, and the Indians were always
the bad guys. That a consciousness that I think is prevalent in this
country now, at least in parts of it, did not exist at the time.

Recently I have come across a book that Hampton Sides, some of you may
know, called *Blood and Thunder*. He is discussing the career and the
mythologization of the career of Kit Carson. Throughout that book there
are representations of the winning of the American West where Indians
were described uniformly as varmints and savages and where the murder of
dozens of them at one moment, thousands of them all together was
considered heroic. That was very popular literature at the time, read
throughout the country in dime novels. That is I think the background of
the murals that we have just seen.

It's a historical accident that the Ariel Rios Building originally
housed the Post Office Department, and I learned from some of the
literature that we received that the artists were in fact given subjects
to paint. So they were explicitly told to produce art that related to
the subject of postal delivery and more or less do. There is
considerable latitude there, but they more or less do that.

Now the building is used for a totally different purpose, so that is
pretty much irrelevant. I think it was also not anticipated that there
would be a number of Native Americans employed in that building, which
is the case now. In terms of that historical background, there is no
compelling reason for exhibiting the art in that location.

I think that it should be taken seriously that the environment is
offensive to people who work there. I think it's also important to think
of it as offensive to some of the people who come there on other
business. And they don't come to see the art by in large; they come to
take care of whatever business it is that brings them there. So the
presence of the art, and the purposes to which the building is now put,
are no longer integrated as they once were.

I think the issue of the aesthetic quality of the work is a factor, but
maybe not the primary factor. It would be in a different environment. I
happen to think that aesthetically speaking some of that art is quite
good. But I'm not sure that that is relevant. I think that under the
circumstances, a more important consideration is that people who come in
and out of the building for whatever reason they do, ought not to be
gratuitously subjected to something that is insulting and harmful \--
harmful in the message that it conveys.

I think that obscuring the art by putting up screens, which is the case
in at least one of them, is not a solution to the problem. On the one
hand, it calls attention to the art, without enabling people to see and
understand it, and on the other hand, it's simply a crude way of dealing
with the subject. In the case of four out of the six items that we are
talking about, they are on canvas, which means that it would be in
principle possible to remove them without destroying them. In the case
of two of them, they are frescos, which makes it more of a problem. But
I understand that they were removed previously to be restored -- and so
-- I mean, this is a technical problem, but it has to be addressed.

I want to say as a recommendation that the American Art Museum in
Washington has an extensive WPA art collection. In a museum there is
every consideration to show work with extensive explanation and ways of
enabling people to look at both the past and the present history. It
seems to me that would be a way of resolving the problem. I don't think
the work should be destroyed; that should be clear. I think that it
should be shown, but it should be shown in a context where its history
and the present controversy can in fact be explored.

I think that pretty much sums up what I want to say.

(Applause.)

CONNIE W. KIEFFER: I want to thank you for this opportunity today to
share my passion about the art and architecture of the New Deal era. The
arts -- as an arts educator, the arts are a universal language, and this
opportunity brings us together to talk about how the art helps us
communicate about our feelings, both present and past and future.

The murals that we are looking at today that are controversial really do
tell a story, as do all murals. And I want to tell you three stories
about three other murals in the Chicago area that have experienced
controversy.

In 1995, a young girl, Hanna Field from Chicago called me at Highland
Park High School in Highland Park, Illinois. She was doing her metro
history project on New Deal murals, and she said: *Our high school had
murals*. I didn't see them anywhere, so I did an all-call, and low and
behold, we had one faculty member who had graduated from Highland Park
in 1955, and he said: *Oh, I remember those murals; they were in the
library, which was torn down in '55*. He said: *Let's go see if we can
find them in the attic.*

Long story short, they were in the attic. They were the only thing in
the attic -- nine panels done by Edgar Britton. We brought them down.
And one of the maintenance men, who was helping us carry them down --
they were quite large -- said: *The only reason we kept these murals is
that they are on plywood, and if we had any broken windows, we could use
the wood to cover it until the glass was replaced*. So much for valuing
art.

As we began to study these murals, we found that they were done by Edgar
Britton, who was one of the three outstanding New Deal muralists in the
Chicago area. He had studied with both Grant Wood and Diego Rivera in
Mexico. He also did a mural here in the Interior Building in Washington,
D.C., and many others.

Were these murals particularly controversial in subject matter? Probably
not, unless you were a woman. They represented nine different industrial
scenes. They contained all white males. But one of the things that
became controversial is on the workman's gloves, there were red stars.
So someone began to ask, what was Edgar Britton's leanings in terms of
socialism?

So Dr. Andrew Hemingway, from the University College in London came to
Highland Park to research Edgar Britton, and was he a leftist artist.
And I'll leave that story to you. You can read his book, called,
*Artists on the Left*, which was published in 2002. But that did create
some controversy. We were able to get them cleaned and restored, and we
used them for curriculum integration.

At the same time, in Chicago, Flora Doody is a teacher at Lane Tech High
School. And she walked the halls and saw many murals. And she began to
work and clean and restore with students the 69 murals at Lane Tech High
School and other sculptures. She raised over a million dollars through
cookie sales and dance marathons and things like that to clean and
restore this fabulous set of murals.

She, with Barry Bauman, and Heather Becker, of Chicago Conservation
Center, began to explore other Chicago public schools, and found over
400 murals from the Progressive and the New Deal era. One of the sets of
the murals from the New Deal era in Lucy Flower High School became very
controversial. They were painted by Edward Millman. They are fresco and
they depict significant women of that particular era. He finished them
in 1940 after two years work. In 1941, the all-male Board of Education
from Chicago Public Schools decided that they should be painted over
because, to quote from a news article in the Sun-Times newspaper, *They
were too depressing, too misery-laden, and too subversive.*

They included women such as Harriet Tubman, Lucy Flower, who started
kindergartens; Francis Parker, Jane Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and Clara Barton of the Red Cross. They were covered
until 1997 when the principal of that school, a woman, finally was able
to secure funding, through the help of the Chicago Conservation Center,
to unearth them. They are absolutely fabulous. They are still there
today, although the school just recently closed. We hope that Chicago
Public Schools will continue to maintain those particular murals and
recognize their importance.

One of the things that I think about with respect to those murals is
that George Biddle, who was one of the early leaders in the New Deal
Mural projects -- there were four of them -- said one of the purposes of
the projects was to identify and be conscious of American life and its
many social problems. And those particular murals of women really did
that.

A third story that have to tell you relates to Indiana University, where
my son attended college. In that particular mural, in 1933 Thomas Hart
Benton made murals of the history of Indiana for the Century of Progress
in Chicago. When that World's Fair was finished, they were taken to
Indiana University and mounted in three different locations, three
different buildings. Over the years, one of the sets of murals in
Woodburn Hall became very controversial because it depicted, as part of
Indiana history, robed members of the Ku-Klux Klan, which was founded in
Martinsville, Indiana, right next to Bloomington, burning a cross. It
also -- this mural also includes an image of a white nurse taking care
of a black child.

While historians say these images represent Benton's best efforts to
display the full array of Indiana history, both positive and negative,
some students objected to the KKK image. In 2002, Dr. Brehm, the
chancellor of IU, came up with a three-part plan related to those murals
and their controversy. First of all, she said, anyone that goes into
that building, Woodburn Hall, where those murals are located, will be
instructed and educated about the context of those murals and why Benton
painted them and used that subject matter.

Secondly, she set up a fund called, One for Diversity. The whole purpose
of that fund is to raise money to create more art and more art of
diversity so that Indiana University can celebrate that diversity and
put up current art that more appropriately represents and celebrates
diversity. And finally, she set up orientation programs for all
stakeholders at the university about the importance of celebrating and
understanding diversity.

Why do I tell you these three stories? I think some of the murals at
Ariel Rios Building are controversial -- obviously; that is why we are
here -- but they do represent from the artist's perspective, the
artist's understanding of history at that particular time. So we
understand the context. Secondly, the Great Depression was a horrendous
time, and the artists were instructed to look at showing the difficult
times during the Great Depression Era.

Lastly, as an arts educator, I feel compelled to note that three of the
four artists whose work we are discussing today became arts educators --
John Lockwood taught at University of Texas, Frank Mechau at Columbia
University in New York, and Colorado Springs Art Center, and William
Palmer started the Art Institute in Utica, New York. And I think the
importance of an arts education, and understanding that context, and
being able to connect what the artist is saying to our own lives is an
extremely important aspect of understanding what we need to do with the
Ariel Rios murals. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

B. BRYON PRICE: Good morning. My name is Byron Price, and I am the
director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the
American West at the University of Oklahoma. I come this morning with a
background that includes not only an academic appointment, but for the
previous 25 years, I served as curator and director of several different
museums in Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Each of these institutions had
art and artifacts broadly interpreting the history of the American West.
So this is not my first rodeo -- (laugher) -- as they say in our part of
the world.

I think that Rayna has certainly pointed out some of the problems and
difficulties that Western American Art has faced over the years,
particularly since the "West as America" exhibition heightened our
sensitivities to the kinds of messages that some of the artworks
emanate.

Western American art, among all American art forms, is the only one
where the value and the significance of the art is tied to its accurate
depiction of history and its narrative message, its fidelity to the
historical analog. Yet "West as America" reminds us to look at these
works not merely as illustration but as art that has a creative impulse,
an interpretive bent, the artists' own personal baggage, as well as
cultural baggage. And I think it's a mistake to simply look at these
works for whether or not they are an analog to history.

If you were to look at all of the murals -- we're only concerned here
with six, but all of the murals, they are all stereotypes. And one might
ask is a benign stereotype that avoids controversy any less destructive
as a form of expression than those that openly expressed conflict?

There have been several occasions over my career when these issues have
come into focus. At the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in
Oklahoma City, there is a rather prominent sculpture by James Earl
Frasier called, "The End of the Trail." It's something of the magnitude
of 20-feet tall, and it had been a part of the Panama Pacific exposition
of 1916. The previous director had negotiated for its removal from
Mooney Park in California to the museum in Oklahoma City. It sat in an
area in back of the main museum in its own space, with a roof that
seemed to bear down on the Indian's back as he slumped over his horse.

And, when we decided to expand the institution, we had to deal with the
idea of what to do with this work. It is not easy to move a work of
several tons, an imbalanced kind of situation just from a physical
standpoint. In looking at what we were going to do with this, we decided
that rather than to gunnysack this problem, or potential problem,
because there are people to whom this symbol is negative, rather than to
move the work off site or move it into storage, we decided to deal with
it up front. We moved it to the very front of the building and showcased
the work in order to discuss the issues that this work, this great icon
of the West engendered.

We asked a Native-American scholar, Dave Edmunds, to provide a native
response to this work, which went along with additional commentary from
James Earl Frasier, the original artist of the work. We incorporated
that into all of the educational materials, to all of the docent
materials. The opportunity to discuss in an open way, day after day
after day, has done more, in my opinion, to undermine the stereotypes
that the work engenders than all of the other efforts than we might have
made.

So there are options, and there are ways to deal with this image, and
these images, in situ or not. Our choice is important. And I would
rather have an open discussion, an open interpretation -- I was
delighted to see the interpretation that has begun. If we make it
someone else's problem, it is still a problem. Thank you.

(Applause.)

PAUL CHAAT SMITH: Good morning.

AUDIENCE: Good morning.

MR. SMITH: My name is Paul Chaat Smith. I'm a Comanche Indian, and since
2001, a federal government worker, employed by the Smithsonian
Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. My position there
is associate curator.

I have been generally familiar with the Rios murals and issues they
raise for some time. When Mary Case asked me a few months ago to take
part in this morning's discussion, I thought about it for a day or two
and then decided to say yes. I said yes because I find the issues
interesting, relevant, and complex. Most of these issues, about the way
histories are made, remade, and understood, and how art shapes our
understanding of the past, and the marginal space native people inhabit
in American history, contemporary life and popular culture are not new
to me.

But the reason I said yes is because I didn't know how I would answer
the key question. Are these murals so offensive that they should be
removed from public display in the Rios Building? Perhaps I should have
said no because this morning I still didn't know how to answer that
question. Maybe that answer will come to me in the next five minutes,
maybe it won't.

Art and history are two human enterprises that one should always
approach with deep skepticism. They are lousy at providing specific
answers to specific questions. On the other hand, successful
practitioners of art and history are splendid at creating new questions,
sowing confusion, and making you doubt things that you thought you were
certain of.

I want to thank the General Services Administration for organizing a
process that engaged these difficult issues. I want to express
solidarity with my fellow Indian workers who find these murals
intolerable. One of the things that makes them intolerable is that on
some level, as Rayna observed, the entire city of Washington is a
hostile work environment for Native people. Thousands of Indians live
here, but we are mostly invisible, except for murals in federal
buildings, monuments, place names, and a certain professional sports
team, few of which portray us in positive ways.

About the murals in question, I like most of them. They were created by
artists, not historians or ethnographers. And I don't care about their
alleged inaccuracies because the artists were not ethnographers or
historians. To me, the murals convincingly tell the stories they were
intended to tell, stories of conquest and manifest destiny, with passion
and verve. They reflect American worldviews of eight decades ago, and
should be evaluated as works of their time.

I know it isn't easy to look at it this way, but as far as representing
us, to me they are like comic books or something. That is not us up
there on those walls. But I'm a professional curator and I don't have to
look at them every day. I'm also Comanche and I'm not offended when
Indians are portrayed as barbaric killers because, you know, that used
to be our job profession. (Laughter.) Pretty much every horrible thing
people said Comanches did, we did. Mostly we did these horrible things
to other Indians. But we did get out of the barbaric killing game a long
time ago.

Although his work isn't on the list, I was especially taken with
Rockwell Kent's 1937 mural that features secret political messages from
an Eskimo to a Puerto Rican nationalist. Kent was apparently referencing
a police attack on a nationalists rally in Ponce, PR. And the written
message in the mural from the Eskimo says, "To the people of Puerto
Rico, our friends, go ahead and let us change chiefs." (Laughter.) "That
alone can make us equal and free."

Regarding the six contested murals, I read them as both monuments and
case studies of the dispossession and disempowerment of American
Indians. So in that sense, they couldn't possibly be more accurate.

In closing, I want to congratulate the GSA, the petitioners who object
to the murals, and the artists who painted them. I think the screens
that obscure some of the murals are interesting, and the history of the
screens are even more interesting. I read somewhere that this building
we are in right now is the most expensive ever constructed by the
federal government, and I love the fact it's named for that Hollywood
cowboy, Ronald Reagan. (Laughter.) The world and this city are
preposterous. (Laughter.) Thanks for listening.

(Applause.)

SHARYN UDALL: Thank you. I'm going to speak from here, if I may. I'm
Sharyn Udall, and I would like to offer two comments from my perspective
as an art historian.

What we have heard today and what you already knew, are a couple of
obvious things, that visual images are extremely powerful in all times
and in all places. They can teach, they can narrate, they can inform in
other ways, and they can cause intense reactions of various kinds.

The history of art, from the ancient time forward, is full of examples
of controversial art, some of which has been removed or defaced. I site
a few examples. In ancient Egypt, it was not uncommon for new pharaoh
ascending the thrown to deface, literally to have chiseled away the
faces on the images of previous pharaohs whose accomplishments or reign
they wanted to obliterate.

Moving forward in time, there is the familiar example from the
Renaissance period of Michelangelo's painting, not of the ceiling, but
of the far wall of the Sistine Chapel, that very last mural of "The Last
Judgment." Michelangelo painted that fresco full of monumental nudes in
various sizes. It's overwhelming. (Laughter.) A subsequent pope, during
the period of the counter-reformation when certain values had changed,
when nudity in art that had been so celebrated by the human essence of
the high Renaissance had gone out of fashion, that later pope
commissioned another artist to go in and add draperies to the offending
parts of those monumental nudes, altering the original intent and
appearance of those Michelangelo sculptures.

Much closer to our own time, we have the resounding example of the
murals of Diego Rivera from the 1930s in Rockefeller Center in New York.
You know this story I'm sure. He had partially completed the murals,
which were about struggles of mankind, and he had \-- in opposition to
the sketches and the plan he had earlier submitted, he inserted the face
of Lenin in those murals. When the Rockefellers found out about this,
they ordered him to stop and then to remove the face of Lenin. Rivera
refused to do that and so the mural was jack hammered off the wall in a
still uncompleted state. Fortunately Rivera was able to reconstruct that
mural the next year at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

Even closer to our own time, we have the example of Richard Serra\'s,
"Tilted Arc."

Now there are many other examples. I just cite these because they are
well known and they are sources of continuing controversy that are
taught today. These are in the art history books; they are discussed.
Now the patronage of those particular works of art, I am very aware, and
I point out to you is quite different from the murals we are discussing
today. They were in some sense private, but in some sense public, but
mostly private patronage. And the old saying, he who pays the piper
calls the tune, is invoked, certainly in understanding what happened
there.

But my point is that history has not dealt kindly with those who go back
and second-guess artists whose work was completed or nearly completed
because perceived values have changed, because time has altered in some
way the reception of those images, and that when those things have been
done, it has been done with the scowling countenance of history looking
upon it.

I also want to mention the specific charge that went into creating the
murals in this office building that we are talking about. In 1935, when
the section of painting and sculpture announced this first national
project to embellish the Post Office Department, the phrase they used
was, "with romantic subject matter in history of post." That word,
"romantic," raises a huge flag for me because, as you know, from the
past, the word, "romantic," in connection with visual arts, literature,
and music, is all about excess. Romanticism is over-the-top,
intentional, emotion-evoking artistic production of whatever kind it is.

So it is often violent. It is often sentimental, nostalgic, tragic, a
hyperbole in every way -- goes into the image of romanticism, and as
concerns Native Americans from the 19^th^ century forward, when they
were portrayed it was, as has already been suggested, as the image of a
dying race often, or alternatively an idealized figure in complete
harmony in nature. The Taos Society of Artists, for example, most often
invoke that stereotype of Native Americans.

The work from the past of Rubens and Delacroix will be familiar as
examples of the predecessors and practitioners of romanticism as all
about being over the top. So when these artists were specifically
charged with producing romantic subject matter, and they were for better
or worse working in an inherited European tradition, for the most part,
of visual art production, it's not at all surprising that some of these
excesses and stereotypes were invoked as part of that romantic charge to
them.

Now I would also like to say that I was privileged yesterday to make my
first visit to the National Museum of the American Indian. I have not
been in Washington since it's opening. And I have to say that I was
absolutely thrilled to be there to see the stories, the representations,
the interpretations that were made of the history and the artifacts, the
traditions of native people by those people themselves. I heard a very
effective tour guide talk about telling stories, about combating
stereotypes, about renewing the tradition and the history of native
people through their own efforts.

So I think that is an extremely powerful and positive presence for
Native Americans in our nation's capital. And then later yesterday when
I saw for the first time these contested murals, my feeling was
inevitably these are so insignificant in comparison to that major
positive statement that is made by that new institution and its contents
and the work that goes on there. I'm not minimizing the message of --
especially Frank Mechau murals or how they are interpreted. Certainly
there are objectionable things in them, but to me, they sort of fade
into the wallpaper in comparison to these powerful and positive examples
and measures that we have, especially through the National Museum of the
American Indian.

So, in summary, let me say that as a recommendation, I would like to
suggest that more education be done about the context for these murals,
their history, why they were done, how the artists were trained and
thought in that era of the 1930s, and that education is much preferable
to any change, alteration, veiling, or removal. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MS. CASE: Well, I am so very, very, very pleased with the way this panel
has unfolded. I think from now on, every time I have a panel, I will
just ask them to speak alphabetically. (Laughter.) It's really, really
nice.

We are almost to the 11:00 hour, and in order to make sure that I have
as much time as possible for anybody who might like to speak, what I
would like to do is ask the panel to step down, have a break, and anyone
who would like to speak publicly, if you could meet with me now, we'll
see who would like to speak, who would like to ask a question or make a
comment. I'll just meet with you as we have, let's say, a 10-minute
break, and then we will reconvene. So anybody who would like to speak
with me, we can just meet, and we will figure out how we can do that,
how many people would like to do that. I'll be right here.

Let's thank the panel again really. Thank you so much.

(Applause.)

If we have time, at the end of -- we can bring them back up here and
they can talk a little bit more. We would love to hear more from each
one of them.

(Break.)

MS. CASE: Thank you for coming back, ladies and gentleman. We're going
to stay with our alphabetical theme. My principal job in this next
slightly less than an hour is to keep time for people. So we have eight
speakers, and they are (JoAllyn Archaubault , Shana Barehand , Jason
Edwards, Kit Farwell , Cinda Hughes , Nigel Simon, Sacheen Smith ), Lori
Wendle . So could we have first JoAllyn , who I have known slightly
personally and since 1986, anyway? Thank you so much for coming. I'm
sorry you couldn't make the panel this morning.

JOALLYN ARCHAUBAULT: I am reading largely from a letter that I submitted
last year in '05, but somehow it didn't get on the website for God knows
what electronic reasons. But I am in sympathy with that. So I am going
to read most of it, and I'm submitting a written copy. And I'll submit
an e-mail copy to whomever.

I must add my voice to those who are unhappy with the continued
exhibition of some WPA murals currently exhibited in the Rios Building.
Upon initially viewing them, I immediately understood why the EPA
employees want them removed or concealed in some way, as they are
offensive to a modern understanding of Native Americans and their place
within American history and modern society.

The WPA produced tens of thousands of artworks in different media, and
employed thousands of artists, writers and musicians in their
construction during the Great Depression. Some of the artists employed
were Native American themselves, and some of the artworks produced were
more respectful and accurate images of American Indians and their place
in regional history. The Rios Building pictures are not among those
images.

The paintings in question, to my mind, are by artists Mechau -- whom I'm
probably mangling his name -- Palmer and Lockwood, present Native
Americans as more like savages, killing helpless civilians and raping
naked white women. In earlier times, paintings such as these were used
as propaganda, rousing popular sentiment against the enemy, whether
British, Germans, Japanese or godless Russian communists. While
propaganda might be understandable during wartime, it is inexcusable
now; particularly when the heathen savages are now American citizens,
many of who have served their country in the armed forces and lost their
lives in the process.

The paintings were intended to be iconic symbols of the conquest of
America's enemies and the establishment of a nation during a time of
national insecurity, the Great Depression. Moreover, in the nation's
capital, the designs chosen for the walls of the Rios Building stressed
the opening of the country -- Lockwood and Free; the savagery of its
Indian enemies -- Mechau; the establishment of national public
institutions like the mail system under threat from barbarian natives --
Mechau; the attack of immigrant wagon trains -- Palmer; and the final
subjugation of Native Americans -- Lockwood. The coverage of the
paintings was national in that expansion from the Atlantic to the west
-- Lockwood. In all images, Indians are either barbarians wrecking havoc
on helpless civilians, or a defeated individual yielding to the power of
the robust United States -- Lockwood.

While this portrayal might be understandable during the period of its
creation, as one would have to remember that racism and ethnic
intolerance was very much a part of the national fabric of the time; it
is totally unacceptable now. This country has experienced 50 years of
civil rights struggle and counter-racism campaign, and it is no longer
possible to tolerate such images of blatant racism on the walls of a
federal building. I suggest that the GSA remove these paintings and
transfer them to the National Museum of American Art, where they could
be available for research and would join an already existing collection
of WPA art.

In addition, reason for their removal is that the painting "French
Explorers and Indians," by Karl Free, is a crude rehash of the original
painting by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues of a meeting between Rene
Laudonniere and I'm mangling his name too a French Huguenot commander
and Athore, son of the Timucuan chief Satouriona, leader of a Florida
tribe near the modern town of Mayport. This took place in late June
1564. The vertical structure that you see in the middle of the painting
was erected by the earlier French explorer, Jean Ribault in May 1562,
and claimed the countryside for the French king, according to European
customs of the time.

While there have been some changes in the painting, it would have been
more honest if it had been titled after Le Moyne, which would
acknowledge the artist's debt to the original painting. But the image
was not widely known at the time, and Karl Free may have thought that no
one would be familiar with the original, or the engraving by Theodore de
Bray , of the original painting.

Collectively, the images do not convey a welcoming environment for
either the EPA Indian employees, the frequent Indian visitors to the
department offices, or for any American who is aware of the power of
images.

While these images can be understood within the historical context of
their creation, they no longer belong in a public setting such as the
Ariel Rios Building. I think a reasonable and responsible solution to
the situation would be to remove the paintings from the wall, and
transfer them to the National Museum of American Art. The curators at
NMAA are familiar with the complexities of art creation and are well
qualified to interpret the historical context for their audiences.

After submitting the above letter last year, I find the same conditions
endure, the same paintings on the wall, and the same bureaucratic
resistance in place. Much public money has been spent in the pursuit of
overwhelming, not addressing, the objections of the Native employees in
the Rios Building and those Indians who visit it. If this money had been
spent in the removal and donation of the paintings to the NMAA, and the
purchase of art created by contemporary Indian artists on the subject of
the natural environment, we would not be here today, and the public
trust would be better honored than I see now. Thank you.

(Applause.)

SHANA BAREHAND: First, I want to say thank you to GSA for holding this
forum, and for working with us. I was at EPA for nine years. I was the
employee that had to look at these murals every morning when I came up
the elevators to the fifth floor. My name is Shana Barehand; I'm Mono
Indian from California. We were a peaceful tribe, of nomadic people,
small in nature. We would have gotten massacred by the Comanches, had
they been around. But luckily, we were in California. My kids are Navajo
and Gila River.

My experience at EPA -- when I first got there, I was a new attorney, I
got hired there and I didn't even have a place to sit. I met a guy -- it
was my first experience being here in D.C. around non-Indian people that
didn't know anything about Indian people at all. I had a guy tell me,
gee, I wish I was Indian so I could sit around and smoke peyote all day.
So it was apparent to me that I was again going to be subjected to the
stereotypes that people have about Indians.

I just wanted to tell another story. I used to work for the Southern
California Indian Center, and we took the students out on a camping
trip. We had a van and the van said Southern California Indian Center.
As we drove through town, we saw the white kids shooting at us. I'm not
sure if the other students in the van saw that, but I saw that. As an
Indian person growing up in society, a lot of us have been subject to
those types of stereotypes. You get really sick of it. And you start
really feeling bad about yourself. I don't want my kids to feel that way
when they're growing up.

I understand Mechau's noble intent on showing that the Indians were
winning. And I understand that's why he painted the paintings, so this
isn't personal against the artist. I'm just advocating that we remove
those murals. I have since left the EPA, because after seven years of
dealing with this issue, it was not going anywhere. Anyone who works for
the government realizes that things move at a -- I don't know -- not
even a tortoise's pace. But I realized that I would have to remove
myself from that situation, so I have since left EPA. So I'm advocating
just removing those murals. I know that they can be removed because they
were removed for three years to a more suitable place. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MS. CASE: Jason Edwards, please?

JASON EDWARDS: Good morning. Thank you for allowing me this opportunity
to address the distinguished panel and Mr. Porter and the rest of the
GSA. My name is Jason Edwards. I am a 14-year veteran of EPA. I am also
Seminole from Florida, and I have African descent as well. I'm not going
to stand here and tell you that these paintings are wrong. We all know
they're wrong. We all know they are inaccurate. That's beside the point.
They are wholly inappropriate to display at my work site.

I have no problem with art expression. I have a minor in art
photography, as a matter of fact. As well as being an environmental
justice coordinator for my office, I am a photographer myself. And to be
subjected to this kind of intolerance on a daily basis is just not
something that I should have to deal with, or you should have to deal
with as tax-paying members of the American public. The building -- the
Ariel Rios Building -- used to house the postal service; it no longer
does. There is a post office located in one of the lobbies, but EPA has
taken ownership of the building, or residence-ship of the building.

Our mission is to protect human health. These murals offer no value in
that mission whatsoever. They are offensive on so many levels. And if I
may speak for one of my absent, used-to-be co-workers, Bob Smith, whose
daughter I believe was in tears almost at the sight of her people -- of
my people being depicted in such a negative manner. I was not intending
to speak this morning, but I felt moved. And I will leave you with one
thought and one question -- would we even be having this discussion if
these murals depicted stereotypes against another race? Would we be
having this discussion if the murals were, in fact, 13-feet high by
20-feet wide of, say, a young black man being lynched by Klan members? I
don't think so. And I sincerely don't think so. And it's offensive to
me, personally, that American Indians -- or Native Americans -- are just
ignored and overlooked to the extent that we find this in art
acceptable, in any context. Thank you.

(Applause.)

MS. CASE: Kit Farwell?

KIT FARWELL: I'm Kit Farwell, member of Comanche nation and an EPA
employee. I'd like to thank Gary and Mary and our panel for being here.
Regarding the panel, all of you are very well expressed your thoughts,
and you're all very good speakers and we appreciated that. Out of
respect to you, I'll make my comments very brief.

Sometimes at EPA we like to bring our kids into work -- sometimes for
career day -- and when the elevator door opens, our kids don't see
period art, they see political art or propaganda that is offensive. And
I would like for us to feel free to bring our kids in to see our
offices, and I hope that the murals could be removed to a neutral
setting where they could be viewed in context. Thank you.

MS. CASE: Cinda Hughes?

CINDA HUGHES: My name is Cinda Hughes; I'm a member of the Kiowa tribe
of Oklahoma and a legislative associate for the National Congress of
American Indians. The National Congress of American Indians was
established in 1944, and is the oldest and largest national organization
of American Indian and Alaska Native tribal governments. Depictions
offensive to American Indians should not be present in buildings owned
by the federal government. Currently, American Indian federal employees
are forced to endure depictions of American Indians as savages,
murderers and sexual predators within their workplace.

Not only must EPA employees suffer through such objectionable material
in the workplace, but the images are also in the very area where tribal
leaders must enter to conduct business in the EPA's Ariel Rios Building.
These offensive depictions create an environment of racial harassment
and must not be tolerated. Similarly, all such racially insensitive
depictions of American Indians must be removed from buildings by the
federal government to prevent the further oppression of American Indians
in the workplace. These depictions offensive to American Indians impede
a healthy government-to-government relationship between the United
States and tribal governments. These offensive depictions disrupt
institutions and processes designed to support meaningful and respectful
government-to-government dialogue and consultation processes. I know
that a lot of the work that I do when I advocate on behalf of tribal
governments, both at the Capitol building and at other federal agencies
across Washington, DC -- sometimes, these are the only images that new
congressional staffers, who have absolutely no history of or
relationship with tribal governments or tribal peoples -- these are the
only images that they have in order to work from when I go in to
represent tribal governments.

Many times, even those who might be chiefs of staffs for various Senate
committees -- for instance the Senate Committee on Energy and Resources
-- was wholly unaware of NCAI or wholly unaware of many aspects of
tribal governments. And to have these images in places where we have to
go and try to conduct government-to-government relations, and try to
establish meaningful relationships -- and also on a peer basis -- this
really impedes our efforts to advocate on behalf of modern American
Indians, and modern American Indian tribal governments.

And it also has a very serious impact upon American Indian children and
among students and their self-esteem and their sense of self-worth, and
their own self-image. We have the highest rate of suicide among American
Indian teens -- men between the ages of 15 and 30 -- in the United
States, and the third highest in the world. And depictions -- popular
imagery -- is something that is very important to youths. We have
television. We have magazines. We have the Internet. All of these
different media images of American Indian peoples does have a direct
impact upon the self-esteem of a people and also with our relationship
with American citizens at large. Thank you.

MS. CASE: Nigel Simon?

NIGEL SIMON: Good morning. First I'd like to thank you all for this very
informative session. I have learned a lot. My name is Nigel Simon. I'm
an EPA employee, taxpayer and a voter. I work in the Ariel Rios
Building, and I must say you do not have to be American Indian and/or
woman to be offended by some of those murals. I am offended by those
murals. I see them everyday. My children do come to work because I
think, as a black man growing up in America, I have two sons -- it's
important to have them see positive images of everyone because they
don't see that on a daily basis. And I would like to say with these
murals, they are hurtful. They are painful. And it's not that -- you
could say it's easy to say it's history, what's done is done.

When you think about even stereotypical, negative images, they still
hurt today. Things like the Birth of a Nation -- I don't know how many
of you have seen that -- but whenever there's a call that goes out that
a white woman has been raped or mugged, the first people they come after
is who? Black men. So images hurt. They are painful. And I do agree that
as a part of history, and we should teach them, but put them in the
proper context. I think they should be in a museum so that way, if I
want to see them, I could go see them. If I work in the building, I have
no choice. And that's where I stand on the issue. I don't agree with
destroying them because there are lessons of the past we need to learn
so we won't relive them. But they should be in a museum. They should not
be where I can see them every day. Thank you.

MS. CASE: Sacheen Smith.

SACHEEN SMITH: Good morning, everyone. My name is Sacheen Smith. I'm
Navajo from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I am currently interning at the
EPA. And when I heard about these murals, it was very hurtful. I may not
be able to see them -- I'm actually kind of glad that I'm blind so I
don't have to view them everyday when I walk into the EPA building. But
on October 16, I was with a friend of mine and she was describing the
murals to me. And we were at one of the ones that was the most offensive
to us as a people, with the raping and killing. The elevator doors
opened and a group of white males came out of them, and they were
laughing and talking about the murals. And we were behind the screen, so
they didn't see us right away. But they saw us. They looked at us, and
they continued their behavior.

I've never felt so hurt and felt so much pain in my life. And just being
an intern, having come to the EPA everyday, it's hurtful. It's painful
for me. You know, I dread coming to work, and I'm supposed to be here
gaining a positive experience interning in Washington, DC. But yet, the
nation's capital has left me with thinking that the federal government
is condoning such discrimination. I'm appalled by it. I hate walking
through those halls. Every time I do, I wonder what's going to happen
next? Who's going to be laughing and joking? And I'm just -- I don't
know -- as I walk through these halls, I dread it and I just -- to
myself, I can just hear my ancestors weeping because this is not who we
are as a people.

I just really, really urge the removal of these murals. What am I going
to go home to tell people from my nation -- that I worked in a place
where they condone discrimination? That's not what they're going to want
to hear from me. But that's what I'm going to have to tell them because
that's how I feel. My heart is saddened by these depictions. I just
really strongly feel that these murals need to be removed and replaced,
and if they're not removed then we, as Native Americans should give our
depictions through art. And they should be put up next to these murals.
Thank you.

(Applause.)

MS. CASE: Our last speaker this morning is Lori Windle.

Lori Windle: Good morning. I'd like to first thank Gary Porter and the
GSA for convening this panel. I know that it's a step in this process
that we're going through, and I realize that it's not the ultimate thing
that's going to be informing the decision-making of the GSA on the
disposition of the murals, but I do appreciate the opportunity to speak.

I had not intended to speak when I came here today. I came from Denver,
Colorado. I'm an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe. I work
for the Department of Interior, Office of Surface Mining in Denver,
Colorado. I'm the Western Region environmental justice coordinator
there, American Indian special emphasis program manager. I also hold a
bachelor of fine arts and a master of fine arts. I'm an independent
documentary maker. So a little bit about my background. Also, I was one
of the many founders, including Mr. Edwards and Ms. Barehand, of the
Society of American Indian Government Employees, and I was their first
chair -- currently secretary.

I had not intended to speak today. I just wanted to see how things
unfolded. I know that there is a rumbling in the Indian community about
this forum in that no representatives of the civil rights -- any civil
rights experts -- were included in the panel. And I realize that this is
very narrowly focused forum on the 106 process. However, we would not
even be in this room if it were not for the feelings of the people who
feel that they have been discriminated against, and that's EPA
employees. A number of those EPA employees came to the Society of
American Indian Government Employees, also known as SAGE, in 2003 and
asked for our assistance with this issue because they'd been going
through their regular processes -- through their management -- and
nothing was happening. So I've actually been involved in this for three
years. Some of the people here have been involved much longer than that
-- six or seven years.

I think that a lot of this is already on the record from what I have
submitted and what SAGE has submitted as far as our comments as a
consulting party in this process. However, something new that I can add
that you may not all realize is that we have SAGE -- I say we -- SAGE
has the support of the National Coalition for Equity in Public Service,
which includes Federally Employed Women, Blacks in Government, Federal
Asian-Pacific Americans Council and National Image, which is the council
of Hispanic employees on this issue. And they have all submitted their
comments to the General Services Administration concerning the removal
of these murals. And also, as Ms. Hughes indicated, we have the support
of the National Congress of American Indians, which includes over 250
sovereign tribal nations. So it's not just a handful of unhappy
employees that we're talking about here. All of these organizations
represent hundreds of thousands of people who are objecting to the
placement of these murals and the retention of these murals in this
federal workplace.

I went to visit some relatives in Detroit last summer. And they took me
to the Ford Museum. I'd never been there before, and what a wonderful
place that is. It reminded me -- I saw something that reminded me of
this particular issue, because as the panel has discussed, as history
moves on, there are differing moral values that can interpret how art is
viewed and dealt with. As history progresses or moves on, I should say,
there are differing moral values that the society itself embodies. The
thing that brought this murals issue back to mind for me was the
placement in the Rosa Parks area -- they have the bus where Rosa Parks
was arrested in that area -- they have drinking fountains, one that says
colored, one that says white. And I would like to say that I believe
this is analogous to that in that forcing individuals who are offended
by these murals to confront them everyday is a form of racism. Mr.
Weinstein -- he mentioned a word as far as the way that the murals were
commissioned -- or artwork is commissioned -- in federal buildings. And
one of the words that he mentioned that really stuck in my mind was
authority. And that is, they were to assert the authority of the federal
government. To me, by retaining the murals in place, particularly the
most offensive ones, that to me is institutional racism, which is an
assertion of the authority of the federal government over American
Indian people and tribes. And that's all I'd like to say right now.
Thank you.

(Applause.)

MS. CASE: So I think that alphabetical thing worked once again, I'm
happy to say. We are past 11:30 now, and I think bringing the panel up
for a second time for 15 minutes or so is probably not the wise thing to
do. We'll just begin to get into a good conversation, and then our time
will be over. I think the power of the final conversations -- the
comments that we've just had -- is the much more important piece of the
program, rather than having another final 15 minutes.

I'd just like to summarize that we have done, I think, what our hope was
-- is to hear a broad array of views. We've seen the complexity of these
issues. We've thought about and seen the ways that these issues have
changed through their context. We've thought about the possibilities of
choice and change. We've seen that our hearts have been saddened by
whatever choice we make. There will be people who are really saddened by
whatever choices are made. So these are not simple things. They take
time.

I want to thank each and every one of you for taking the time out of
your busy day to contribute as you have; to listen; to be part of the
grandfathers and grandmothers in your listening for yourselves and our
children and our children's children. Thank you for coming. .

(Applause.)

(END)