In the pandemic summer of 2020, as Black Lives Matter protesters toppled statues honoring Confederates and colonialists, simultaneous calls to remove monuments honoring the frontiersman Christopher “Kit” Carson reverberated along the Rocky Mountain corridor that links Denver and Santa Fe. The oldest memorial is in Santa Fe, an obelisk dedicated in 1885 that sits outside the U.S. courthouse there. In Denver, Carson was commemorated in the Pioneer Monument, erected in 1911 near Civic Center Plaza. The base featured a white hunter, prospector, and pioneer mother, and Carson towered over them, brandishing a rifle. The Carson of these monuments is a pathfinder who paved the way for white civilization in the U.S. West. The Carson of history is more complicated. He participated not only in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples but also in two forms of slavery practiced in nineteenth-century North America. The West and the nation need worthier, more honest memorials.

Carson’s life illuminates the enslavement of both African Americans and American Indians. He was born in Kentucky to people of Scots Irish descent who enslaved African-descended people. The Carsons moved to Missouri in the early 1800s. The family wasn’t prosperous and at 16, Kit followed the Santa Fe Trail west in search of new opportunities. The trading trail tied the U.S. western frontier of Missouri to the northern Mexican frontier of New Mexico, passing through lands controlled by Indigenous peoples. The trail also connected two regimes of slavery: the enslavement of African Americans, mostly by Anglo Americans, in Missouri and points east, and the enslavement of American Indians, mostly by Spanish Mexicans and other American Indians, in New Mexico and the wider borderlands.

So Carson moved from one slave regime to another. During the years he spent traversing the West as a trapper, hunter, and U.S. government guide, he married two Indigenous women, a Northern Arapaho called Singing Grass, who died, and a Southern Cheyenne called Making Out Road, who divorced him. Then he wed a nuevomexicana. Carson and his wife Josefa Jaramillo purchased Navajo captives according to the custom of the country, by which Spanish Mexicans made servants of Indigenous people and masked the coercive nature of the practice by calling them criados, from the verb criar (to raise up), as if the captives were nurtured in hispano families just as hispano children were. Apologists argue that Carson acquired Native captives to save them from abuse by other captors, but the record to confirm such claims is spotty and the experiences of the Carson criados are unknown.

Carson’s other encounters with Indigenous peoples varied. After the U.S. conquest of the Southwest in the 1840s, during the Civil War, he served in the Union army and as federal agent for Muache Ute, Jicarilla Apache, and Taos Pueblo Indians. Once Confederate forces fell in New Mexico, Carson turned to the subjugation of Kiowas, Comanches, Mescalero Apaches, and Navajos. General James Carleton sent him in 1863-64 to round up Navajos from their homeland, destroy their crops and herds, and force many of them on what became known as the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, where they languished for years alongside Mescalero Apaches before those who survived were allowed to return home. By then Carson was dead. He passed at the age of 58, just after he accompanied Ute leaders to Washington DC to negotiate a treaty protecting what remained of their diminishing homeland.

Even before he died, Carson’s persona took on a life of its own. His fame derived less from his deeds than from their promotion, starting in the 1840s, by government explorer John C. Frémont and by his wife Jessie Benton Frémont, who helped write her husband’s reports and who also penned her own tributes to the guide. In the 1860s, dime novelists picked up the Carson tale, pulling it further away from an actual past. Veneration of Carson was part of a rising tide of white supremacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when monuments like those in Santa Fe and Denver were commissioned. When activists respond to such monuments, they’re reacting to a mix of history, myth, and white supremacist ideology.

Present-day protesters who want the monuments removed echo calls that arose in the 1970s, when their activist forebears brought matters to a head in the corridor between Denver and Santa Fe. At Colorado College in Colorado Springs, an Akwesasne Mohawk faculty member, anthropologist Shirley Hill Witt, protested an ROTC exhibit featuring a photograph of Carson. The college also employed Carson historian Harvey Carter, and the two professors locked horns in a war of words. The college removed the offending photo in 1972.

The next year, in Taos, New Mexico, demonstrators turned their ire on Kit Carson Memorial State Park, where Carson and Josefa Jaramillo are buried. Hispano and Indigenous activists, organized by the American G.I. Forum, a Mexican American civil rights group founded in Texas in 1948, demanded that the space be renamed for an Indigenous soldier from Taos Pueblo who died in a Japanese prison camp in World War II. Newspapers across the state covered the story, as did the New York Times, but the protest failed. Calls to replace the park’s name continue.

The controversy moved north in 1974 when restaurateur Sam Arnold hosted a debate about memorialization of Carson at The Fort, Arnold’s eatery near Denver built to resemble Bent’s Fort, the Santa Fe Trail trading post where Carson once worked and near where he died. Historian Harvey Carter and David Fernández of the Taos G.I. Forum chapter presented the opposing views. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that the debate ended in an “amicable draw.” In all, the 1970s controversies brought only the removal of single photo on a small college campus.

No surprise, then, that opposition to Carson memorials has arisen again across the same geography and among the political descendants of those who protested in the 1970s. Activists today decry Carson’s role in Native dispossession, however complicated that role was by his advocacy on behalf of and intimacy with some Indigenous peoples. Activists haven’t noted how the Carson family benefitted from the two forms of bondage that pervaded North America in the nineteenth century, however complicated that embrace of slavery was by Carson’s choice as a southerner to fight for the Union in the Civil War and by limited evidence that he bought human beings to protect them from more ruthless slaveholders.

History is complicated. But there are good reasons why Santa Fe’s mayor, responding to the Indigenous advocacy group Three Sisters Collective, has expressed support for removing the Carson monument that fronts the federal courthouse in New Mexico’s capital city. Meanwhile, plywood protects the obelisk. Early in the summer of 2020, Homeland Security vehicles guarded it too. Likewise, there are good reasons why the American Indian Movement of Colorado has called for removal of the Pioneer Monument in Denver. City workers there hauled the Carson figure away so it won’t suffer the same fate as a nearby sculpture honoring Christopher Columbus that protestors toppled. The Denver memorial’s fate is undecided.

It is little known today that the original design of Denver’s Pioneer Monument featured an Indigenous man where Carson ultimately wielded his gun. Early twentieth-century white Denverites objected to a heroic portrayal of an American Indian, and Carson took the Native man’s place, in a telling case of art imitating life. Activists have focused on this sort of dispossession. But Carson and his family were also deeply enmeshed in the enslavement of both African Americans and American Indians, further justifying protestors’ demands. That Homeland Security vehicles have protected the Santa Fe Carson monument indicates that as a nation, we don’t yet fully understand whose homelands and whose freedom we’re bound by history to defend.