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From a global pandemic and nationwide protests to a contested presidential election, this year seems tailor-made to expose Americas partisan fault lines. Those hoping for a blue or red wave to unite the country on election night were undoubtedly disappointed. What the returns revealed instead was a divided electorate.

Even before the election results underscored Americas political gulf, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her faith became something of a national Rorschach test for where Americans line up on the partisan spectrum. Some viewed Barretts Catholicism, and her involvement with the charismatic Christian community, People of Praise, as tantamount to Margaret Atwoods dystopian novel, The Handmaids Tale. For others, Barretts faith was evidence of her character and integritya signal that shed live up to her oath to impartially discharge the dutiesof the office.

What explains this divergence?

The data suggest that our national divide is deeper than just knee-jerk partisanshipit involves a confluence of religio-geographic trends in the United States that all but guarantee the kind of political gridlock we saw manifest this month at the ballot box. The United States is not a purely secular nationnor is it a fully religious one. The country stands out among its international peers as distinctly balanced. And acknowledging this reality may be the first step to burying the countrys cultural weapons of war and embracing a posture of greater political pluralism and cooperation.

According to our recent survey report sponsored by the Wheatley Institution, a non-partisan research center at Brigham Young University, slightly less than one third of the U.S. population is deeply religious, frequently attending church services or engaging in other religious activities in their homes. Another third is fully secular, never participating in any sort of religious practice, whether its prayer, reading holy writ, or attending services. Meanwhile, a final third of Americans are nominally religiousattending services infrequently or engaging in other practices with varying levels of devotion.

These findings align with the 2020 National Religion and Spirituality Survey from the NationalOpinion Research Center as well as findings from the Pew Research Center, which estimates that roughly a quarter of American adults today are religiously unaffiliated.

The story of secularisms rise is well-documented. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the worlds more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little, notes political scientist Ronald Inglehart in Foreign Affairs. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. The Atlantics Derek Thompson similarly notes the rapid ballooning of the religiously unaffiliated, tracing its relative size from around 6 percent of the U.S. population in 1991 to more than a quarter today.

So, what happened?

Theres no simple answer. And, certainly, people stop affiliating with their religious tradition for many reasons. However, sociologists Michael HoutandClaude Fischer have published research suggesting that an aversion to the religious rights involvement in politics throughout the 1990s (and beyond) may have influenced the decision of self-identified moderates and liberals to disaffiliate from religious institutions during this period.

Organized religion, they write in their 2014 study, gained influence by espousing a conservative social agenda that led liberals and young people who already had weak attachment to organized religion to drop that identification. The scholars note a causal link between the religious rights entrance into public conservativism and disaffiliation among certain pockets of the population: Political liberals and moderates who seldom or never attended services quit expressing a religious preference when survey interviewers asked about it.

These findings are significant, but they dont tell the full story of American faith in the twenty-first century. Much like the bifurcated reaction to Amy Coney Barrett, the same trends that seem to push some toward secularism may also help crystalize faith in others. Indeed, even as the nation is becoming more secular, in another sense, its also becoming more religious as well.

For example, a 2017 study from Indiana Universitys Landon Schnabel and Harvards Sean Bock suggests that intense religion has persisted even as more moderate religion has seen declines. In other words, ascendent secularism is accompanied by a deepening of religious intensity. Speaking to The Washington Post, Schnabel compared this phenomenon to a container getting smaller, but more concentrated. So, yes, the steady stream of cable news chyrons on waning religious affiliation are accurate (the religious landscape is shifting) but the real story is more complicated.

The fact is that the highly religious in America havent gone away. Theyve remained steady as a percentage of the population, which means their overall numbers have grown with the population and their higher-than-average fertility patterns are one sign that the trend probably wont reverse. Thus, those anticipating a full conquest of secularism in the United States shouldnt hold their breathneither should those rooting for a modern-day Great Awakening.

It may be that recognizing the nations religious and secular demographics as both stable and balanced could broker the kind of dtente that recognizes cooperation and the search for genuine understanding as a productive path forward.

Pluralism, after all, has always been what makes America exceptional on the world stage. In our report, we analyzed data from more than 16,000 survey participants in eleven countries, looking specifically at how religion in public life varies across populations. In Latin American nations like Columbia and Peru, most respondents were both religiously affiliated and active in their faith. As you would expect, in European countries like France or the United Kingdom, religious affiliation and participation were much lower. Whereas religion was once predominant in these nations, today, secularism reigns.

The United States, meanwhile, stands out for its unique demographic mix of both seculars and the highly religious. Of the eleven countries analyzed, only in the United States do these two groups have to deal with each other on somewhat equal grounds.

Specifically, we estimate that there are a little more than 100 million American seculars and about 85 million Americans who might be considered highly religious. In other words, there are more seculars in the United States than there are people in all of the Nordic countries combined plus Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, Austria, and Switzerland. Likewise, the church-attending population of the United States is larger than the combined populations of Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

Thats a lot of seculars. And thats a lot of religionists. So, its easy to see why one side or the other might feel like they own the country and they should control the nations levers of political power. An October poll showed that Christians, particularly white evangelicals, supported Donald Trump by a very wide margin (78 percent) whereas atheists and agnostics supported Biden by an even larger margin (83 percent).

Seculars and religionists may share this much in common: a mutual fear (and misunderstanding) of the other. This idea explains why they often fight so hard to gain and maintain political advantage. The phenomenon is also likely exacerbated by geographical segregation. Seculars often live on the coasts or in other urban settings, while religionists are more commonly found in the rural South and Midwest. According to a 2017 survey from The Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation, fully 78 percent of rural Republicans said, Christian values are under siege. If these geographically separated groups bump into each other, its usually through the less-than-humanizing lens of social media.

With these interests so evenly spread, knowledge of the nations demographic balance cant help but prompt seculars and religionists to see the culture wars as a battle with little prospect of a full victory. But, given the current political environment, moving from an acknowledgment of demographic realities to actual political cooperation may be asking for a miracle of biblical proportions. And yet, at least we know that there are many Americans who might be willing to pray for one.

Spencer James, Hal Boyd and Jason Carroll are faculty members in Brigham Young Universitys School of Family Life. They are each affiliated with the Wheatley Institution.

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Why the Partisan Divide? The US Is Becoming More Secularand More Religious - Religion & Politics

As I write this, most world leaders, the media, state election officials across the country, and the majority of American voters now agree that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election by a clear margin. Joe is now acting more presidential almost two months from his inauguration than the orange menace has in four years

But beyond the obvious, who else has come out of this strange election in a better or worse place? In other words, who really won? In a word, the oligarchs, 1-percenters, or billionaires, choose your label. Just look at how much money theyve raked in during our mismanaged pandemic ($10.2 trillion worldwide).

Many people saw this election and the Trump presidency as the main problem and the only solution to what ailed America. Wrong. Trump is just a very orange, very visible symbol but by no means the cause.

Systemic racism has always been here; he just made the racists comfortable enough to come out in the open. Income inequality is now at world-beating levels. But thats just an acceleration of what Reagan started.

The true winners right now are the super wealthy. The eight individuals (and others we never hear about) who now hold more wealth than the next billion folks on the planet. That group. The shadowy folks who fund the right-wing think tanks, Fox News, Breitbart, the Federalist Society, One America News, and so on.

This crew, folks like the Kochs, the Walton family, Betsy Devos and her brother Eric Prince of Darkness have been funneling money and buying influence for decades all in hopes of ultimately taking over everything. In their world, our only purpose is as replaceable wage slaves whose lives are devoted to making them ever wealthier.

The level of division in our country now and in many other countries, is a direct result of their influence played out over mainstream media, social media, and general propaganda channels. The more divided the populace is and the more divided government is, the less likely it is that the oligarchs will be encumbered by irritants like higher taxes, environmental regulations, strong unions, and strong governments. Make no mistake, we are at war with the 1-percent and they are winning in many places.

One of the big things to come out of the disaster that is/was the Trump presidency is the widespread recognition of the incredible racism that rules our country. And why did it finally come to such a head? Was it just Trump and his dog whistles and overtures to the Ku Klux Klan? Was it police violence against people of color?

Trump and his father before him were avowed racists. To have a racist in the Oval Office was a David Duke wet dream.

Now we see much more clearly just what our Black and brown neighbors have been dealing with for a couple of centuries and just how far we are from true equality. Folks, theres a ton of work still left to do.

But keep in mind that the oligarchs are behind a lot of the racism in terms of funding and messaging. Again, it keeps us divided.

And lets not forget the constant attacks on women and their rights by the Rapist in Chief and the right wing of our society led by rabid evangelicals and demagogues of all sorts. But the right-to-life folks (forced-birth people) have always been in it to control women, not save lives.

If they truly cared about lives, theyd do away with the death penalty, fund social programs, and come out strongly for gun control. Never happen. These are gun-toting, bloodthirsty misogynist bigots hiding behind the Bible and the flag.

And again, these folks are funded in large part by dark money funneled through fronts and fake charities directly from the coffers of the oligarchs. Its just another way to keep the culture wars going and keep us divided.

Look at every divisive issue in our society and you will find wealthy people funding the divide to keep us from paying attention as they rape and pillage the planet. Bernie Sanders has been saying all this for the past 30-plus years and only recently have people picked up on it.

But for now, there is some light. Joe and Kamala are two real people with our interests first and foremost, and that gives me hope. But dont kid yourselves, they are imperfect and their efforts will be compromised by our broken government. Moscow Mitch McConnell has already gone public saying he would not allow Joe to appoint just anyone to his cabinet and approve them if theyre too radically left for his tastes. Of course, Mitch may be on shaky ground if he loses the two contested Senate seats in Georgia.

Its nice to look forward to four years during which it is unlikely our leaders will be a daily embarrassment on the world stage and a living menace to our rights and our democracy. I think Joe and Kamala will govern much like Obama did, with class, humility, professionalism, and a commitment to doing the right thing whenever possible.

Their opposition is secretive, well-funded, dug-in, and willing to break any laws or norms to stay on top. That is our fight now.

Never forget that the wealthy are typically apolitical, amoral, areligious, and sociopathic. They worship the twin gods of money and power and thats it. But it also makes them vulnerable and obvious after a fashion and weve seen the naked depravity, greed, and violence they wielded in the past four years.

Lets keep that in mind, folks. Your enemy isnt the guy in the MAGA hat or the person with the Biden sign on the lawn. Your enemy is the guy who pays Moscow Mitch to load the courts with unqualified political hacks who will reliably rule against unions, womens rights, the environment, clean air, clean water, equality and public education. The people who would clear-cut the Amazon rainforest for profit while we all choke on dirty air and the seas rise.

Thats public enemy number one and with Joe and Kamala on top, maybe, just maybe, we can get these folks where they live: tax them hard and regulate their criminal behavior. If they win, we all lose because our country and our planet are doomed.

Michael Seinberg is a columnist, social critic, and professional cynic. But he says hes sharpening his word processor and making new protest signs as the fight is just getting interesting.

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The winners, the losers, and the rest of us - The Altamont Enterprise

It was October 1991 and Anita Hill was testifying against Clarence Thomas. At the judges US supreme court confirmation hearing, Hill, his former aide, claimed he had sexually harassed her. Kimberl Crenshaw was assisting Hills legal team and felt dejected and exhausted. As she left the capitol building in Washington DC that day, she saw a group of African Americans, mostly women, gathered at the bottom of the steps in a prayer circle. She let out a sigh of relief and walked towards them.

I thought: Oh, thank God, a place we can go and embrace each other, because this is a struggle, Crenshaw says. It was the day before Thomas confirmation, and she felt the future of the civil rights movement was on the line. But when she reached the group, she saw they were wearing T-shirts proclaiming their support for Thomas. She watched with dread as they sang songs of praise and called Hill a jezebel. It was like a horror film, she says. You think youre safe, but it turns out that the people youre running to are actually infected with whatever youre running from.

As she walked away from them, she thought about how the case exposed the theoretical gap in the legal profession when it came to black womens lived experience. During the explosive hearing, televised and watched across the country, Hill, then a teacher at the University of Oklahomas law school, spoke in great detail of her allegation that Thomas harassed her when he was her supervisor at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yet he retained tremendous support and, in his infamous defence, called the hearings a hi-tech lynching.

What Crenshaw saw was that, with feminists supporting Hill and anti-racist activists defending Thomas, twin calls for equality were being put in opposition to each other. The groups were weakening each others movements instead of supporting each others cause and it was black women who paid a significant price.

For Crenshaw, who is now one of the most influential black feminist legal theorists in the US, Hills case cemented her idea of intersectionality, set out in a paper two years before the hearing. The idea suggests that different forms of discrimination such as sexism and racism can overlap and compound each other in just this way. At the time of Hills case, Crenshaw was writing another paper, Mapping the Margins, on the erasure of black womens history of being sexually harassed and abused. The Hill case showed the result of the fact that sexual harassment had largely only been discussed in relation to white women.

So many people were corralled by the idea that sexual harassment isnt a black womans issue, she says. So many people didnt understand that slavery was about institutionalised sexual harassment and abuse. There were 700,000 slaves in 1790; by the eve of the civil war, there were nearly 4 million. How did that happen? Its right in front of us and there are no words for it.

Her paper set out how feminism had failed to analyse that race was playing a role in making some women vulnerable to heightened patterns of sexual abuse. And it was also the case that anti-racism wasnt very good at dealing with that issue either.

Hills case, Crenshaw believes, was also a painful example of the failure of representation for representations sake. Thomas, the supreme courts only black justice, played a decisive role in gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013. The ruling struck down the system that blocked discriminatory voting policies before they harmed voters.

Crenshaws early academic work, meanwhile, was also an important building block in the development of critical race theory, which revolutionised the understanding of race in the USs legal system and is taught in law schools across the country. The heads of the University of Californias law schools explained in September how useful it was in unpicking how race has operated in our history and our present and understanding the structural racism through which racial inequality is reproduced in economic, political and educational systems even without individual racist intent. (Crenshaw is a professor at one of the schools, UCLA Law, and at Columbia Law School.)

In the 30 years since Crenshaw first wrote about intersectionality, the term has swept to the forefront of conversations about feminism and racial justice. It is used by activists, in HR training in some of the worlds largest corporations and is at the heart of the rightwing backlash against identity politics. At the end of October, the term critical race theory was spoken in the UK parliament for the first time, when Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, announced the government was unequivocally against fundamental parts of the concept.

My mom was more confrontational and my father was more Martin Luther King ... there are strains of both in my work

In some ways, Crenshaw is excited by the high profile her theories have gained, even if they are being condemned: It is far better that is circulating and being used than if only 25 law professors have read it. In September, Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop racial sensitivity training, labelling it divisive, anti-American propaganda. Crenshaw is happy to have the fight and point out how absurd this argument is. So, what are you saying American is having structural racism? If contesting it [racism] is un-American, then you are basically a witness to my side, she says. You are confirming why this work is so important.

Unsurprisingly, Crenshaw backed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the election: You dont have to describe Biden and Harris as being heaven in America to oppose the hell of a Trump administration. In a statement, she described their win as a historic night, thanks to Harris becoming the highest-ranking woman in US history, as well as the first black person and the first Indian American to become vice-president. Crenshaw noted that Bidens victory speech thanked the African American community, writing: We must hold him to that promise And we must move forward intersectionally, and with an eye towards our past.

Crenshaw knew from a young age that she wanted to be a lawyer. When she was six, she was sent to church with her 14-year-old brother. It was summer and her dad told them to stay together. But her brother wanted to leave early and use their collection money to buy sweets. They took their time walking home, enjoying the goodies, not realising their parents would go to the church to pick them up. When Crenshaw got home and saw her parents were not there, it was clear there would be trouble.

But, she says, it never occurred to me in a million years that I would get in trouble, because I was following his orders. She argued to her dad that this was in a lose-lose situation for her: she was in trouble for following her brothers rules, but she would also have been in trouble if she had not gone with him. In the end, her father told everyone: Dont let her get a word in edgewise. When she starts to talk, you will not know what you were trying to say. And thats when they started calling me a lawyer.

Crenshaw was born on 5 May 1959 in Canton, Ohio, a small industrial town in the midwest. Her mothers side of the family were heavily involved with the desegregation movement (her mother helped desegregate a paddling pool at the age of three), while her fathers side had a more spiritual advocacy for racial justice. My mom was a little bit more radical and confrontational and my father was a little bit more Martin Luther King and find common ground. Which is probably why there are strains of both of those in my work.

She remembers watching the civil rights movement explode across the country on her TV as she was growing up. Seeing a big, collective effort to change black peoples trajectory in the country shaped her identity. Her parents, who were both teachers, kept her on her toes. I remember being teased by my friends because, when we got called in for dinner, we had to come to the table with something to say about what another day on the planet was, what did we learn and what happened, Crenshaw says. Inevitably, she liked to turn the tables and question her parents on their day.

If contesting racism is un-American, then you are basically a witness to my side

At one point, she was sent to a Christian fundamentalist school that had smaller classes and better grades. It was a horrible experience. One teacher told her that civil rights activists were not God-fearing and were, in fact, the people the Bible warned about in Revelation. It was like now, when people say Black Lives Matter protesters are thugs, Crenshaw says. But it also sharpened her skills in challenging authority and, to the discomfort of some teachers, the exceptionally bright Crenshaw represented the school in debating and spelling competitions.

She could handle being in conflict with her teachers, but struggled when another pupil called her the N-word and isolated her from her friends. It was the first time I had seen abject racism from a kid my age, Crenshaw says. That hurt more than any of the crazy stuff the teachers were doing. She begged her mum to pull her out; she transferred to the local school at which her mum taught.

She went on to study at Cornell University in 1981, then got a law degree at Harvard law school in 1984 and a masters in law at the University of Wisconsin the following year. It was within the critical legal studies a movement of legal scholars founded in the late 70s that dissected the idea that the law was just and neutral that Crenshaw developed her ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality.

Those ideas which she felt were obvious to everyone who had experienced racism and sexism were controversial among some leftwing legal academics. There were some folks who felt that the loose network could not survive centring a race project inside of it, she says. Crenshaws work asked people to think of the privileges they brought into a space and how, through their actions or silences, they contributed to the problem of racism.

Because of this, it is often criticised as somehow undermining the building of a multiracial working-class movement. In response, Crenshaw argues that the US will never be able to respond to the problem of class until it interrogates what she describes as the politically stabilising role of white supremacy in propping up American hierarchies. That has been the case since slavery. Why did so many white farmers who were impoverished by this economic system make themselves available, amenable, even champions of an economic system that didnt benefit them?

She points to a documentary about a white Klansman who said that, although he did not have much, he thanked God every day for being white. Why is that more important than the fact that he cant put food on the table? Crenshaw asks. When people tell me that intersectionality marginalises class, I say no, intersectionality is what we need to understand why its been so difficult to mount a fully class-centric movement.

Away from the classroom and courts, Crenshaw co-founded the African American Policy Forum, now one of the countrys leading social justice thinktanks. In 2015, it created the hashtag #SayHerName to highlight how black women were being overlooked as victims of police violence. As a longtime campaigner against police brutality against black women, Crenshaw was initially disappointed with the response to the killing of Breonna Taylor by police in March in a botched narcotics raid, which has since received nationwide attention. Her name didnt really get lifted up until after George Floyd was killed, she says. Had Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd not been killed, would we be saying the name of Breonna Taylor?

Nonetheless, Taylors death could be a turning point for the civil rights movement in the US, Crenshaw says. It could become the door through which people can see all of the other sisters whove come before her. That would be a shift in consciousness and awareness about how black women can be thought of and seen as the subject of anti-black violence, Crenshaw says.

She compares the killing of Taylor to the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Taylors death, and the deaths of black women in general, has not mobilised an entire movement, an entire way of thinking about anti-black racism, in the way they say that Emmett Tills killing did. But, she says, what draws them together is that, as far as the legal system is concerned, its rendered judgment was that no one would be held accountable for either of these deaths.

Crenshaw sees her work as an important recalibration of how the black struggle is understood. Rosa Parks came into politics not when she sat down on a bus, but when she took up the case of Recy Taylor, a black woman who was gang-raped, and the white men who did it were not brought to justice. These are the stories that a male-centric view of anti-black racism does not consistently remember, rehearse and retell, Crenshaw says. This results in a failure to challenge the myth that black women dont face sexual and state violence, leaving women like Recy and Breonna Taylor vulnerable and isolated. For Crenshaw, this rewriting of history that centres the violence black women experience is crucial for taking the black freedom struggle forward.

With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, Crenshaw says people are finally beginning to see how intimately the issues they care about are connected to the courts. In many ways, her career started at the USs highest court. Would she accept a nomination to be on the court? She laughs. I would do it, after I take my ice skates off, having skated across hell.

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Kimberl Crenshaw: the woman who revolutionised feminism and landed at the heart of the culture wars - The Guardian

Just a few months later, the President went off on football players who protested racial inequality by kneeling during the national anthem, calling them in a speech sons of bitches who should lose their jobs. (He also lamented that rule changes meant to reduce head injuries were ruining the game.)

Will the divisions stoked over the past four years remain?

That was the demarcation point, the moment when sports and politics and culture collided in a way that hadnt really happened before. Certain athletes have taken political stances, particularly on civil-rights issues, over the decades, and those had inflamed their own controversies, but the prospect of the U.S. President picking a fight with professional athletes was highly unusual. The anthem issue, which had been all but forgotten, became a new thing for some NFL players to rally around, although support was far from universal, and athletes in other sports spoke up in their defence, most notably in the NBA, where superstars, coaches and role players alike were not shy about criticizing Trumps characterization of athletes who had opted for a peaceful protest. That split, with a number of high-profile athletes on one side and Trump and many of his supporters on the other, has persisted for years. It has been a strange storyline of the sports business in the recent past, where events that had long been apolitical were suddenly a big stage in the culture wars.

Much like how Trumps presidency made a certain degree of chaos an everyday occurrence, the outsized influence he had on the sports world also quickly came to feel normal, even though it wasnt. Stories about declining television ratings for pro sports considered whether the spectacle of kneeling players had driven away viewers, or whether anti-Trump statements from athletes like LeBron James or Steph Curry had dented their sports overall popularity, even though television ratings, as traditionally measured, have been declining across all programs for many years. Trump, of course, insisted that the NFL was headed straight to irrelevance if it didnt fire players who knelt during the national anthem. The NFL has managed to avoid this fate. White House visits became radioactive, with some championship teams attending the traditional ceremony with the President of the day and earning criticism for doing so and others choosing not to go. This exercise reached the perfect level of farce in 2018, when the some of the Philadelphia Eagles were going to attend the White House but the ceremony was cancelled a day ahead of time. The reasons for the cancellation were never quite clear, although there were suggestions that the number of attending players would have been small enough to be embarrassing, and Trump took the opportunity to insist, again, that football players should always stand for the national anthem. Whatever else one might think of his political acumen, he figured out early that that particular message stand for the anthem, you ungrateful athletes plays very well with many of his supporters.

Continued here:
In the Trump era, sports became a major front in the culture wars. So are those battles now over? - National Post

While citizens across the U.S. tear down statues, I lift up local art depicting this areas first inhabitants, the Native Americans.

Among these few public works are Hector Garcias Chief Little Turtle (1976), a 10-foot bronze sculpture located in Headwaters Park. With one hand open in communication and the other closed in defiance, the figure challenges those crossing the footbridge over the St. Marys River into the Old Fort.

When I was a Brownie and a fourth grader studying Indiana history in the 1980s, I spent nights at this fort pretending to be a guard or a prisoner stuck in the pillory. The central theme of my education was that Fort Wayne began when white settlers developed Kekionga, former capital of the Miami tribe. In that context, Little Turtles statueoutside the fortpresented confusion about the good guys versus the bad guys.

Today, I live in New York City where I observe my hometown from a distance. The lessons I learned as a child reflect narratives told to Americans on a national scale from an early age. Statues are tangible evidence of sometimes skewed perspectives.

A bust of Cheif Little Turtle by Sufi Ahmad in the Flagstaff Bank Building at Wayne St. and Calhoun St.

As we prepare for Thanksgiving 2020 in an election year during a global pandemic that has exposed racial inequities, Fort Waynes few Native American sculptures are especially poignant. They exist in contrast to an army of General Mad Anthony Waynes.

Earlier this year, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage examined the culture wars brewing in Fort Wayne in a piece he wrote for Politico. He focused on Wayne Day, a new annual event honoring the citys namesake.

On one level, to grow up in Fort Wayne was to be saturated in references to Anthony Wayne and the Native Americans he fought, Savage writes. I opened my first savings account at a branch of Anthony Wayne Bank, across Anthony Boulevard from an ice cream parlor that served massive Mad Anthony sundaes.

Savage and I attended North Side High School, home of the former Redskins, recently renamed the Legends. His article revealed just how much my sense of my hometown was manipulated, right down to the visuals I absorbed every day.Garcias Little Turtle statue appeared in a photograph in Savages article, too.

Recently, I spoke to Garcia, now 86, in a series of phone conversations. He believes his sculpture of Little Turtle may be Fort Waynes first and only freestanding sculpture depicting the Miami chief.

Little Turtle was left out to dry, says Garcia, who has also created several renderings of Wayne, including a relief for Wayne High School.

A bust of Chief Little Turtle on the Main Street side of the Allen County Courthouse by Brentwood S. Tolan (1902).

Before Fort Wayne celebrated the nations bicentennial in 1976, the only sculptural reference Garcia found of the chief was a bust on the Allen County Courthouse.

Naturally, Wayne maintained a high profile in the city named for him. The most prominent works are the equestrian statue in Freiman Square and the smaller aluminum relief on Anthony Wayne Bank.

But in the summer of 1975, Garcia asked a pointed question to members of Fort Waynes American bicentennial committee: What about the other person in our history? As an answer, Garcia earned a commission to build an imposing statue honoring Little Turtle, whose real name was Mihihkinaahkwa.

Little Turtle led the Miami within a coalition of tribes that surrendered to Wayne in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. A year later, the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 resulted in the U.S. acquiring large tracts of land, including one piece six miles square, at or near the confluence of the rivers St. Mary's and St. Joseph's, where [F]fort Wayne now stands, or near it.

Knowing he could not stop the arrival of white settlers, Little Turtle encouraged his people to assimilate in order to survive. He died in the area in 1812. In 1846, U.S. troops forced approximately 300 souls out of northeastern Indiana by way of the canal boat network, according to a historic preservation officer representing the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.

The Miami people settled in Kansas until the U.S. government relocated them to Oklahoma in the 1870s. Today, the Miami population includes more than 5,800 enrolled citizens who are scattered throughout all 50 states and beyond, according to a historic preservation officer representing the Miami Tribe.A bust of John Nuckols by Hector Garcia (1985) inHanna Park at Maumee Ave. and Harmar St.

Garcia, a South Bronx native, is of Puerto Rican heritage. He wonders if growing up outside of Fort Wayne may have made him sensitive to people living on the margins. He also sculpted Jesuit Priest (1974), located near the Three Rivers Water Filtration Plant and John Nuckols (1985), a bust of Fort Waynes first African American city councilperson.

Garcias challenge with Little Turtle was to envision a likeness based on few existing images.

Through his observations of Native Americans and others who live close to the land, Garcia developed a composite sketch, an amalgam, of what Little Turtle might have looked like.

Forming the sketch model, which was about 2-feet tall, was sometimes emotional, not unlike a conversation. Garcia gave this early rendering a nickname: Turtle. Turtles prominent features included high cheekbones, a rectangular face, a strong jaw, and a proud chest.

The actual statue was more technical and required months of planning and execution. In the vacant Journal Gazette building on South Clinton Street, he first molded Chief Little Turtle with oil-based clay. A photograph from that time shows Garcia astride a ladder. His shoes are roughly the size of Little Turtles kneecaps.

Then he and his wife and children covered the massive figure with plaster to form a cast. Garcia drove the cast, divided into sections, to the foundry in Michigan. The completed work was revealed in a 1976 dedication ceremony that also honored the restored Canal House on E. Superior Street.

Over the years, Garcia has met a few Miami descendants. They thanked him for representing their history with a respectful statue.

Another sculptor, whom a few local artists describe as Garcias rival, was Sufi Ahmad. An art teacher at the University of St. Francis, Ahmad grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, and died in Fort Wayne in 2011.

Lenore DeFonso holds artwork by Sufi Ahmad.

Like Garcia, Ahmad had sculpted several busts of local leaders, including Little Turtle and Wayne, that appear in the rotunda of Flagstar Bank, ironically on E. Wayne Street. But Princess Mishawaka (1987), located in Mishawaka, stands out as especially unique. Based on an early American legend, Ahmads interpretation reveals an athletic woman with a regal bearing.

Ahmads partner Lenore DeFonso remembers how Ahmad made the large sculpture in the side yard of their home on Oakdale Avenue.

Its my favorite of Sufis pieces, DeFonso says. Its her pose and the way she sits on the rocks. She is reaching back for an arrow in her quiver. She looks like shes ready to deal with whatever comes her way.

A statue of Princess Mishawaka by Sufi Ahmad (1987) at Mishawaka City Hall.

Sadly, as Charlie Savage wrote in his Politico piece, Native Americans would continue to suffer under this countrys broken oaths and unfair treaties, even though Wayne had promised the rest of the territory would remain Indian land foreverhence Indiana.

And for generations, Waynes images have dominated a city that systematically removed its earliest citizens.

Read more:
Fort Wayne's culture wars seen anew this Thanksgiving through statues - inputfortwayne.com