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On Sympathies and the work of Public Things: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Challenge to Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian Statue and Settler Fantasy

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Abstract

Focusing on recent community efforts to repair Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian statue, this article reads the statue as a public thing. In doing so, I argue that sympathy active at the 1911 unveiling of Taft’s Indian statue and 2020 restoration capture what I call settler sympathy. Instead of granting the ability to see from the other’s perspective, I illustrate how settler sympathy relies on image and myth fundamental to sustaining the settler nation. I turn to the thought of Oneida activist-intellectual Laura Cornelius Kellogg to locate settler sympathy as well as another sympathy, what I call fraternal sympathy. Where settler sympathy takes fiction to make things public for settler gain, I argue that fraternal sympathy finds in fiction a means to make alternative places where publics thrive through things that do not annihilate but rather affirm self-determination.

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Notes

  1. Dakota intellectual-activist Charles Eastman was also invited to respond to Bancroft. Excluding Eastman and Kellogg, spectators at the dedication were exclusively white. I have chosen to focus exclusively on Kellogg’s response for two reasons. First, unlike Kellogg’s speech, Eastman’s speech lacks recognition of the sympathy anchoring Bancroft’s speech. Second, Kellogg’s written and political work beyond the unveiling identify sympathy as a sentiment present in the settler nation; like his response to Bancroft, Eastman’s other works do not focus on entertain sympathy’s presence in political life.

  2. The temporal element of settler sympathy I identify in Kellogg’s work shares qualities of what Mark Rifkin has termed ‘settler time,’ a hegemonic temporality that perpetuates state violence and negates Indigenous ‘temporal sovereignty’ (Rifkin, 2017, p. 5). Rifkin, however, does not focus on sympathy’s relationship to either Indigenous temporal sovereignty or settler temporal formations.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Giulia Oskian, Karuna Mantena, and Aziz Rana for the conversations that encouraged the development of ideas shaping this article. I am indebted to Morgan Galloway, Alexia Alkadi-Barbaro, Da’Von Boyd, Anne Mishkind, and Joy Wang for generative comments on various drafts. An early version was presented at the 2021 meeting of the Association for Political Theory. I thank John McMahon, Alena Wolflink, co-panelists, and audience for their feedback. Lastly, I thank John Grant and the two anonymous reviewers at Contemporary Political Theory for their suggestions and guidance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Leila Ben Abdallah

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Correspondence to Leila Ben Abdallah.

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Ben Abdallah, L. On Sympathies and the work of Public Things: Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s Challenge to Lorado Taft’s Eternal Indian Statue and Settler Fantasy. Contemp Polit Theory (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-025-00763-y

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  • DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-025-00763-y

Keywords

  • Settler colonialism
  • Sympathy
  • Public things
  • Placemaking

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