"Resonances of this disorientation visited me unexpectedly a few years later when, in August 2015, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz described the creepy place, as she said, that is the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, South Africa. In attempting to explain how she felt about approaching this structure, witnessing it, she talked around a feeling that I thought, even in her lack of distinctly articulating it, I could very clearly understand and relate to.  She was telling me that day about visiting the Voortrekker Monument and how, following the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, the African National Congress left intact many of the monuments and museums which glorified apartheid, but inverted their narratives in one way or another, displaying in certain cases more accurate accounts of the historical record. Inside the Voortrekker Monument, she explained, one finds representations of the colonizing of South Africa which look uncannily like those representations of the colonizing of the U.S. It may as well have been the same artists, she told me, as had painted many of the famous images of the settling of the American West, complete with calistoga wagons; only, of course, in this case there were no Lakota or Apache clashing with the voortrekkers. Instead there were the Zulu.  But in talking about the sense that she had, not only from that uncanny analogue, but also from the structure itself, the feeling with which she was struck and indeed which had left her struck, Roxanne seemed less able to find the right words than when describing almost anything else that day. I remember, particularly, that she used the word ""place"" repeatedly, saying ""that place"" many times in one breath. She impressed on me that photographs do no justice to the immensity of the monument. I felt I could entirely imagine the unsettled awe that the place had inspired in her, and wondered if we had not actually had analogous experiences in approaching such massive, unlikely structures, whether intentional or incidental.  Later that day, I met a friend for dinner and he asked me if I had heard that Mount McKinley had been renamed Denali."
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