MORE FOOLISHNESS FROM MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY.

It's evidently more important to send the right virtue signals than to understand history.  The university recently changed its Great Seal.

The reference image for the scene is an 1869 painting by Wilhelm Lamprecht titled "Pere Marquette and the Indians." However, critics say the way in which the scene was cropped to be put in the seal leads to a misleading depiction of the power dynamic between the Jesuits and their Native guides — one rooted in the mindset of settler colonialism.

Here's the full painting.

What you see in the full painting communicates a different power relationship than what the presentists read into the excerpt in the seal.

In the full version of Lamprecht's painting, standing eye-level to Jacques Marquette on his left is another Native man who is giving the missionary and his Native companion directions from the river's shore.

In other words, the cropping of the image in the old seal gives the impression that the explorer was giving directions when, in fact, he was asking for them, critics say.

That's all too much for Red State's Alex Parker. "Indeed — a brouhaha boiled because it appeared the white guy was the one giving directions."

It's better than that.  Marquette and Joliet's initial mission was to find the Northwest Passage, as the Americas were a major roadblock on that ocean route to India and China (which, recall, is what Columbus was looking for, and why there are American Indians in archaic usage).  They got as far inland on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes as Green Bay, and somehow found out from the locals about a "large waterway" to the west.  Yes, up the Fox to Lake Winnebago, further up the Fox to near Portage, thence overland to the Wisconsin, and that goes to the Mississippi in the painting.  But when you're all done with the Mississippi, you're still not to the Pacific.  On their return north, they learned about a different portage between the Illinois and Chicago rivers.

I wonder if the rewriters of history will next come, or if they already have come, for a similar monument in Milwaukee.

How long, also, before those crucifixes and Jesuit references have to go?