“Eugene resident Joyce McClain was one of the people behind the proposal to rename Swastika Mountain.
“I submitted the paperwork, and I’ve been talking with the US Geological department and the state,” McCain said.
McClain said this all started back in January when she was reading the paper and came across an article that mentioned two hikers were lost in the area of Swastika Mountain.
“I couldn’t believe what I was reading, and so I had to do something about it,” McClain said.”
Mount Kailash: The Nine-storey Swastika Mountain
In a land of giant peaks at the summit of the world, Mount Kailash doesn’t even figure in a list of the 25 highest… in yet it still manages to stand out from all the other mountains in the Tibetan massif.
At approximately 22,000 ft above sea level, it is the most sacred site on Earth for four of Asia’s predominant religions, with pilgrims of the Buddhist, Hindu, Jain and Tibetan Bon faiths all drawn to the peak to take part in ritual processions around its base.
Board members meet to discuss renaming landmarks like Swastika Mountain | Regional | kdrv.com
Swastika Mountain – FOREST LOOKOUTS (weebly.com)
Swastika Mountain is a summit in Lane County, Oregon, in the United States.[3] It is located within Umpqua National Forest.[4]
The mountain took its name from the extinct town of Swastika, which was reportedly so named because a rancher there branded his cattle with the image of a swastika.[5][6]
A fire lookout tower stood atop Swastika Mountain until the 1950s.[4]
Five years after removal, Confederate statues may go to L.A. – The Washington Post
Board members meet to discuss renaming landmarks like Swastika Mountain | Regional | kdrv.com
Five years after removal, Confederate statues may go to L.A.
By Lilly Price
August 23, 2022 at 5:01 p.m. EDT
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Tucked into the corner of an East Baltimore impound lot teeming with discarded lampposts and street signs, four Confederate-linked monuments have sat for five years since they were removed from public parks across the city in the middle of the night.
Ever since that night on Aug. 17, 2017, when they were hauled off to the lot and hidden away, city officials and historians have debated what to do with the bronze statues erected to honor Confederate figures. No home emerged until a Los Angeles visual art space called LAXART asked to borrow them for a new exhibit.
The large-scale exhibit, called Monuments, will open in the fall of 2023 and places contemporary art created by renowned Black artists alongside decommissioned Confederate statues removed from American cities after the 2015 killing of churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist and the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
Eric Holcomb, division chief of Baltimore’s Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, said city officials are excited about the exhibit planned by nonprofit LAXART curators Hamza Walker and Kara Walker, and Museum of Contemporary Art at Los Angeles curator Bennett Simpson.
“The interpretation of these monuments by this museum is actually going to be healthy and beneficial for the whole country, and it’s going to move us forward in terms of our conversation about race and conversations about history,” Holcomb said. “We believe the monuments are going in really good hands with really smart people.”
The city’s law office still needs to approve a loan agreement with the museum before the statues, some weighing seven to 14 tons, are loaded onto a truck and shipped to California. Baltimore is not paying any transportation costs, Holcomb said.
Then-Mayor Catherine Pugh (D) in 2017 ordered the four statues, which were installed from 1887 to 1948, to be taken down from their pedestals across the city “quickly and quietly,” she said at the time. They included the Lee-Jackson Monument located in Wyman Park Dell, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway, and the Roger B. Taney Monument in Mount Vernon.
Taney was not a member of the Confederacy but the chief justice of the Supreme Court who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War.
The message the statues conveyed to Baltimore residents about slavery and the Civil War was wrong, Holcomb said, and the statues also posed a safety risk to people who threatened to pull them down.
The threat to remove statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville resulted in the Unite the Right rally in which a counterprotester was killed when a man drove into a crowd.
Five years after the Baltimore statues’ removal, the monuments in the city-owned lot off Pulaski Highway in the Pulaski Industrial Area are secured in a metal fence and Jersey barrier enclosure. An art conservator inspected the statues in 2021 and determined that each was in good condition, according to Monica Lewis, a city spokesperson.
The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, though, is still marked by red paint thrown on by protesters before it was removed.
Holcomb estimated that the city received 24 offers to use the monuments. The Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation asked each person or group how they planned to interpret the statues and most wanted to use them to positively convey the Lost Cause myth that the Civil War was an honorable fight over states’ rights rather than a war over slavery, and that Jackson and Lee were great soldiers, Holcomb said.
“I think we’re starting to understand that Lee and Jackson were actually traitors,” he said.
The Maryland division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization for male descendants of Confederate soldiers that opposed the removal of the statues in 2017, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation decided that LAXART was the best alternative use for the statues because it would help change the message of the monuments through artists’ interactions with them. The exhibit will feature educational talks, performances, activities and workshops by art historians, politicians, artists and activists. The contemporary art on display will feature existing and newly created paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos.
“A frequent argument against removing monuments from public space claims that doing so is ‘erasing history’; we intend to do quite the opposite by examining these objects in their entirety with historical depth and nuance,” Walker wrote in a description of the upcoming exhibit.
The exhibit will last a year or more. After that, it is unclear where the monuments will go.
Perhaps the exhibit will become successful and travel the country, Holcomb said, or maybe the bronze statues will be melted and recast to celebrate legendary Baltimoreans, as Mayor Brandon Scott proposed when he was a city council member. But for now, the Maryland Historical Trust, which has an easement on three of the four monuments, does not want the statues destroyed, Holcomb said.
Scott did not respond to a request for comment via a spokesperson.
Board members meet to discuss renaming landmarks like Swastika Mountain
- By: Grace Smith
- Aug 20, 2022
- 0
EUGENE, Ore.—Several places in Oregon with controversial names could possibly get renamed after members of the Oregon Geographic Names board had their annual meeting.
One of the prominent places that is up for change is Swastika Mountain in Lane County.
Eugene resident Joyce McClain was one of the people behind the proposal to rename Swastika Mountain.
“I submitted the paperwork, and I’ve been talking with the US Geological department and the state,” McCain said.
McClain said this all started back in January when she was reading the paper and came across an article that mentioned two hikers were lost in the area of Swastika Mountain.
“I couldn’t believe what I was reading, and so I had to do something about it,” McClain said.
Kerry Tymchuck, the executive director of the Oregon Historical Society, said members gave the green light to discuss further changing Swastika Mountain to Mount Halo.
“Which refers to a chief of the Kalapuya’s many years ago; that’s the name that is now being forwarded,” Tymchuck said. “We must circulate the names with the local Indian nations, county governments, and other interested land owners. They’ll have 60 days let us know what they think about the name, and then the board will meet again in December in hopes that there are no objections that have come our way since then, then that name will be moved to the US Geographic Names Board.”
He said the mountain was named early in the 20th century before the word was tied to Nazi Germany.
“A Swastika was some sort of spiritual shape, and a farmer rancher here in Lane County used it as a brand cattle or livestock which led to the name of the mountain,” Tymchuck said.
Tymchuck said he understands why some people are upset with the name and pushing to change it.
There was a petition created online in January pushing for this name change; it has a little over 550 signatures. The creators said they felt the name was inappropriate and that the Bureau of Land Management and USGS needed to help rectify the issue.
But Swastika Mountain wasn’t the only name on the meeting’s agenda. A total of 8 places in Douglas, Grant, and Wasco County were discussed, as well as what could be their new names.
McClain hopes her actions will inspire others to stand up for something they believe in.
“Renaming something that a person thinks is wrong, people should go out there and do the legwork and do something about it. Be active, not just let it go by,” McClain said.
Two hikers, 19, who spent NINE DAYS stranded on Oregon’s Swastika Mountain are finally were rescued on New Year’s Day after search crew spotted their SOS in the snow
- Two 19-year-old boys who went winter camping on Oregon’s Swastika Mountain Range, southeast of Eugene, were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard on January 1
- Christian Farnsworth and Parker Jasmer drew an SOS symbol in the snow near their vehicle, drawing rescuers to their location
- They had been out in the elements since Christmas Day
- The boys’ parents reported them missing after they failed to return home on December 29 as scheduled
- Coast Guard reps said the pair gave themselves the ‘best chance of being rescued’ by staying near their vehicle and close to logging roads
- Farnsworth’s parents were left with scant information by their son, and launched a social media campaign to assist rescuers in pinpointing the boys’ location
- Katrina Crawd=ford, Farnsworth’s mother, stressed the ‘the absolute importance of clear communication’ to DailyMail.com ‘because this was hell’
Rosamond Press 