Monuments to Midwestern Pioneer Mothers

Midwestern pioneer monuments celebrated the family values long associated in popular memory with that region, but until very recently erased Indigenous women. Comparing the design and public reception of dozens of Midwestern pioneer monuments highlights continuities and discontinuities over place and time in definitions of Americanism and public memory of race and gender in the nation’s heartland.

Cynthia Prescott is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History & American Indian Studies at the University of North Dakota. She is the author of Pioneer Monuments in the American West (2019) and Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (2007) and co-editor (with Janne Lahti) of Colonial Violence and Monuments in Global History (2022) and Backstories: The Kitchen Table Talk Cookbook (with Maureen S. Thompson, 2021). She is developing a Reacting to the Past role-playing game for classroom use, “Memory Reconsidered: San Francisco Pioneer Monument, 1991-96.”