All sculptor John Houser wanted to do was build the largest bronze equestrian statue in the world — but art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, as explored in this week’s featured Vision Maker Media film.
“The Last Conquistador” tells the story of how the city of El Paso’s decision to commission Houser’s statue of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate opened deep divides among the city’s inhabitants and sparked a decade of protest by members of the Acoma tribe, who remember Oñate not for deeds of exploration, but for the massacres, slavery and terror he brought to the original inhabitants of New Mexico.
Watch “The Last Conquistador” on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting website.
Check back here every Tuesday, or follow us at @amarchivepub on Twitter to keep up with featured streaming films over the 40 weeks of the celebration. You can find the complete schedule here.
About Vision Maker Media
Vision Maker Media is the premier source for quality American Indian and Alaska Native educational and home videos. All aspects of Vision Maker Media programs encourage the involvement of young people to learn more about careers in the media – to be the next generation of storytellers. Vision Maker Media envisions a world changed and healed by understanding Native stories and the public conversations they generate.
With funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Vision Maker Media’s Public Media Content Fund awards support to projects with a Native American theme and significant Native involvement that ultimately benefits the entire public media community. Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) empowers and engages Native People to tell stories. For more information, www.visionmakermedia.org
Each week for the next forty weeks, a different film featuring Native voices from Native producers will be available to stream free online, in celebration of Vision Maker Media’s 40 years supporting American Indian and Alaska Native film projects.
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