The basis for this article is novel. It involves taking the stairs and going to the library. Should you find yourself doing these two somewhat antiquated activities you will run into another relic of a different time.

I recently interviewed Kevin Bourgault, who received a Ph.D. in Education at the University of Oregon and who is also a Skokomish tribal member. As we ironed out the details of our interview, little did I know he had ulterior motives for asking me to meet at the Knight Library.

Before we began our conversation, Dr. Bourgault ushered me up the two stairwells on either side of the foyer of the Knight Library to view the twin murals the “Development of the Arts” and the “Development of the Sciences.” 

Painted in the 1930s, the murals by brothers Arthur and Albert Runquist each center around a tree trunk that purports to show human development as it rises from its primitive base to the flowering of high culture and modernity.

In broad strokes each mural depicts eras of development in a linear progression as the characters in the scenes develop more sophisticated forms of art and science, ending with representatives of modernity including the artists Shaw, Paderewski, Caruso, Bernhardt, Orozco and the scientists Einstein, Curie, Marconi, Edison and Burbank.

A large mural in the stairwell of the Knight Library. This mural depicts a racist past through the artwork.Absent from the artist’s interpretation of the more ‘developed’ and physically higher levels of the murals are any images of Indigenous, African or Asian cultures. Of the eight panels in each mural, Egyptians are the last vestige of any remotely dark skin on the third panel from the bottom in each.

The linear narrative of higher civilization rising from the primitive and graphic depiction from dark skinned to light skinned is a stark reminder of the cultural narratives that seep into so many facets of our history and which have become so depressingly normalized in our society.

As a university community, with a campus on the land of the Calapooia Indigenous people, it is important to challenge these vestiges of the past and build bridges of understanding and appreciation for the cultural, social, and environmental histories of Indigenous people and people of color. The reductionist history and focus on technological advance as progress has left many in our society fractured and out of touch with our planet and the shared human history that lies beyond the mainstream Euro-American narrative.

Solving these problems is a piecemeal process, with slow gains and frequent setbacks. Though painfully slow and deliberate, some progress has recently been made on the UO campus with the renaming of Dunn Hall and the movement of the UO Foundation towards divesting in fossil fuels. In keeping with this trend the University should also honor the demands of the Black Students Task Force and approve their proposal for a black cultural center on campus.

With regard to the murals, there seems to be a few different solutions. The easy one, and I think least instructive or productive, would be taking down the murals and writing them off as a vestige of a narrow minded and tacitly racist past. While this would remove the affront of the art to Indigenous people and people of color, it would fail to recognize the past and capitalize on what I think could be an instructive learning moment.

The option Dr. Bourgault suggested, and I agree with, would be a pair of artistic rebuttals to the murals. Commissioning artistic rebuttals to these murals by native artists and artists from communities of color would acknowledge the historic nature of the existing murals while giving modern artists and thinkers the opportunity to push back against the degrading racist imagery of the existing murals.

Leaving the murals as is and refusing to acknowledge the reprehensible messages of racial and cultural superiority would leave an existing injustice and embarrassment in place and an opportunity to further progress towards equity and inclusion would be lost.