- Everyone was telling me, as a child growing up, George Washington is, like, a friend to the Indians.

And you don't hear about the breakup of tribal systems, the stealing of tribal land.

During the Revolutionary War, George Washington ordered the destruction of Iroquois towns and crops, and therefore was known as the "town destroyer" by the Seneca.

When I first heard about the mural controversy, it was sort of wrapped up in a lot of the other controversies we've had around Confederate monuments and other racist monuments that have been taken out of the public domain.

(crowd rioting) And it turns out that it's a lot more complicated, obviously.

What's complicated about these murals is that they do attempt, or as far as I know, a very early attempt, to reframe our understanding of the infallible nature of our Founding Fathers to say, "This is who Washington was."

He was a slave owner.

He did participate and actively direct at times the genocide of Native Americans, and that is a hard image to reconcile with the image that we grow up hearing about our Founding Fathers.

- Arnautoff wanted to make it clear that George Washington was not without contradiction, and that the country itself was born through its great rhetoric of liberty and freedom, in the contradiction of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans.

But, the idea of liberty is a great idea.

The ideas that the Founding Fathers articulated are some of the most important ideas that human beings have ever devised.