Renaming Carson park spurs debate in Taos

It’s a sentiment shared by others, including newly elected town Councilor Fritz Hahn, a white man who was part of a majority vote last week to strip Carson’s name from the park and rename it Red Willow in deference to Native Americans.

The Tuesday vote, intended to ease some of the pain that many indigenous people still feel about Carson and other settlers, reignited a bitter debate in New Mexico over the recognition and honor that should be placed on historical figures with complicated pasts.

Hahn said he has been flooded with complaints from “angry” constituents since the council renamed the park, where Carson and his third wife, Josefa Jaramillo Carson, are buried side by side. Hahn said he has been encouraging people to attend the next council meeting June 24 to voice their concerns, but he’s not going to change his mind.

“Here’s the core issue: When I hear people from the pueblo saying that they don’t like coming into town, they feel diminished, when I hear our Pueblo sisters and brothers talking about not even wanting to go to Kit Carson Park because of what he represents, I take note because this is our community and our town,” he said. “And if we are offensive, we need to take note, adapt and change.”

Historian and author Marc Simmons, who has studied Carson for 30 years, called the name change a “great travesty” that “tramples on the truth of history.”

“I guess I won’t be coming to Taos anymore. You can quote me on that,” Simmons said.

“It’s politicizing history,” added Simmons. “It fits into the dialectic today and the lean toward the extreme left, which means dethroning — and Kit Carson is not the only one — anybody who made a splash on the frontier.”

The dissidence over historical figures who clashed with the Indians has played out in different ways in New Mexico.

In 1998, a vandal or vandals sawed off the right foot of a bronze sculpture of Don Juan de Oñate at a cultural center in Alcalde named after the conquistador. In Santa Fe, statues of other conquistadors, including Don Diego de Vargas, have been defaced and spray-painted with the words murderer and killer.

At the Kit Carson Memorial Cemetery in Taos, adjacent to the newly renamed park, a streak of paint tarnishes the legendary scout’s name on a historic marker.

“History is messy and fraught with contradictions,” Hampton Sides, author of the 2006 best-seller Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, said in an email. The book provides a sweeping history of Carson and the opening of the West, including an unflinching account of The Long Walk, Carson’s brutal removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly to Bosque Redondo in southeast New Mexico, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war.

“Even our greatest historical figures were deeply flawed,” Sides said. “George Washington, as a young man, fought and killed Native Americans. He, like Jefferson and many other of our founding fathers, owned slaves. Lincoln, probably our greatest president, personally signed the orders approving the Navajo war that Kit Carson reluctantly led.”

Sides said he pulled no punches in “depicting the absolute devastation of Carson’s ‘scorched-earth’ campaign.

“But one needs to remember that it was indeed a war,” he said. “It was a war that had its genesis in centuries of brutal raiding and kidnapping between the Navajos and the Spanish, a cycle of violence that the U.S. Army was seeking, in its own flawed way, to end.”

Town Councilor Jude Cantu, a Hispanic woman who also voted in favor of renaming the park, said she was married to a Native American for 21 years and heard the indigenous people talk about the hurt and humiliation that Carson represents.

“Having been fortunate enough to have lived in their world, I know a whole different version,” she said.

But, Simmons said, Carson is erroneously regarded as an enemy of the Indians.

“Kit Carson was one of the good guys,” Simmons said.

“If I was young and vigorous, I would start a movement to have Kit and Josefa’s remains exhumed and transferred to a better cemetery,” he said. “I might even get them transferred to the national cemetery in Santa Fe, since he’d be entitled to that since he was a member of the Army.”

The conflicting and contradictory narratives of Carson’s life and his relationship with Native Americans play out in Sides’ book.

“Carson fought hard against the Navajo, but he loved Taos and was a friend of Taos Pueblo,” Sides said in his email. “So far as my own research could discover, he was a friend to all the pueblos. Certainly he was no Indian hater. His first wife was Arapaho and though he was illiterate, he was fluent in many Indian tongues.”

Later in life, Sides added, Carson “successfully negotiated the creation of a reservation for the Utes and became an eloquent and insightful critic of U.S. Indian policy.”

Carson, born Christopher Houston Carson in Kentucky in 1809, lived in an era that was harsh and often cruel. History books have labeled him a trapper, scout, rancher, mountain man, Indian agent and Indian fighter, among other descriptions.

While some accounts portray him as an honorable man who was respected by the Indians and had two Native American wives, Carson is vilified for his role in The Long Walk.

In 1864, on orders from Brig. Gen. James Henry Carleton, who conceived the idea of removing the Navajos, U.S. Army troops under the command of Carson rounded up thousands of Navajo men, women and children and forced them to march about 400 miles from their homes in northern Arizona and New Mexico to a reservation at Bosque Redondo in southeastern New Mexico. Scholars estimate that thousands of Navajos, many of whom consider Carson a war criminal, died along the way.

His men also scorched thousands of acres of crops, destroying millions of pounds of food.

Karen Douglas, executive director of the Kit Carson Home & Museum in Taos, which draws about 20,000 visitors annually, said the museum presents an unbiased history of Carson.

A museum pamphlet states that some people consider Carson a hero. Others say he was a rugged frontiersman who understood the ways of Native Americans better than any other Westerner. Still, others view Carson as an Indian hater “whose only interest was in fighting and killing Native Americans,” the pamphlet states.

“We’re not promoting. We’re not demoting. We’re here to keep this part of American history alive,” Douglas said. “I think somebody said it the best: the good, the bad and the ugly.”

Douglas believes Carson was a “very conflicted” man.

“He had to take these orders from his superiors, and yet there’s no doubt that he loved Native Americans, so he had to be very conflicted,” she said. “I think he just must’ve been torn in half. I’m not excusing anything, by the way. It just must’ve been a terrible time in our country’s history.”

The Town Council heard Tuesday from four residents, including a pueblo member, who requested the change, saying Carson’s name was a sore spot for Native Americans. The group suggested renaming the park Red Willow. The Taos News reported that the word Taos translates to “place of the red willow” in Tiwa, the pueblo’s native language.

The council’s 3-1 vote generated criticism that officials acted too fast.

“We possibly could’ve gotten more input from the public, but it wouldn’t have changed my mind,” Cantu said.

The agenda item was advertised in the legal section of the local newspaper, Hahn said. While lack of public input is a “valid criticism,” Hahn said, he doesn’t believe the council rushed into a decision.

“I have been aware of some of the divide in our community for decades, not over the renaming of the park, just racism in general,” he said.

“From my sole perspective, we did it to help heal our community,” Hahn said. “It’s about reconciliation and beginning a discussion about how we treat each other with dignity and respect. There have been great transgressions that we need to address and begin talking about and begin healing from and moving forward.”

Ian Chisholm, tribal secretary of Taos Pueblo, said the pueblo also was unaware of the council’s actions to rename the park.

Even so, he said, “I think Taos Pueblo supports the renaming of the park due to the negative connotation that the name Kit Carson has amongst the indigenous people of the area. We don’t view this action as erasing the past, but acknowledging and reconciling the history of Taos so that we can move forward in the future and better address issues that are important to the community as a whole.”

Sides said he understood the council’s decision, though he disagreed with it.

“Kit Carson was brave, loyal, and true to his friends, his life bristled with incident, and he did many heroic deeds,” Sides said in the email. “But he could also be incredibly violent, even by the standards of his time. These contradictions are what make him, to me, so deeply interesting. He was at the nerve center of a lot of controversial history … and town councils don’t like controversy.”

A gaggle of children at the park Thursday were divided over whether they preferred the old or new name of the park. In a show of hands, most indicated they preferred the original name.

When one of their chaperones asked if they knew why the name had been changed, a brown-eyed girl answered without hesitation.

“I heard they wanted to change it because that Kit Carson guy was a killer,” she said.

Contact Daniel J. Chacón at 986-3089 or dchacon@sfnewmexican.com. Follow him on Twitter at @danieljchacon.