Deconstructing the McCombs Frontier Americana Collection

On the second floor of the McCombs Student Center, there is a hallway filled with display cases. At this writing, they are all empty, still carrying a sign placed there in fall 2023 that says “Exhibit Undergoing Renovation.”

From 1998-2023, these cases were filled with the artifacts from the McCombs Frontier Americana Collection, curated by the same people that the building is named after, Red and Charline McCombs--the same people whose daughters’ names define the three meeting rooms that make up the McCombs Ballrooms: Connie, Marsha, and Lynda.

As written on the plaque describing the area, the McCombs Frontier Americana Collection “relates to the pioneer-frontier era of American history, from the initial periods of exploration, conquest, and settlement through the 20th century.” The collection had a wide range of objects, ranging from books, skulls, clothes, a range of Native American artifacts, and lots of weaponry. Pistols, cannons, rifles, knives, and swords were the majority and placed at the beginning of the hallway. At the very end of the hallway, high above the floor, was an oil painting depicting the Alamo.

While the collection sat there for 25 years on second-floor McCombs, almost everyone in the community knew it was there, but it never had major foot traffic going directly to it. It was something you might notice if you were going to an event in the McCombs Ballrooms, or if you were sitting studying on the couch on the landing and suddenly became aware that there was a cannon pointing at you.

As I will show in this entry, that sense of a problematic history hiding in plain sight provides us with a perfect metaphor for how Southwestern has never fully grappled with the legacy of being founded in “frontier Texas” itself, just as it has never reckoned with its legacy as a predominantly white institution (PWI).

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In terms of University history exhibits, it was strange in that it was not specifically about the history of Southwestern, but some other history. As its plaque declared, the collection was there to show history, but not a history that Southwestern was a part of—at least not directly. What I mean by that is that none of the artifacts were identified as having played a role in Southwestern’s history in particular. However, in other ways, the collection is exactly a reflection of Southwestern’s history. That’s because Southwestern’s early history as an institution in the 1800s is thoroughly intertwined with the history of the Anglo conquest of Texas and the American West during the same time period. Several other Placing Memory entries outline this intertwining.

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In recent years, the terms ‘anti-colonialism’ and “decolonization” have become much more common in cultural studies. It’s helped us see that one effect of settler-colonialism in Texas has been that the main story coming out of that experience celebrates the Anglo people who stole land and forcefully conquered other cultures—first the Native American people such as the Tonkawa, Comanche, and Jumano that we now refer to in our “Land Acknowledgement Statement,” but also the Mexican and Tejano peoples who called this place home well before it became an Anglo republic.

If you grew up in Texas like me, the Anglo triumphs are what we looked up to as children and we took some of their ideas of heroes and made them our own, even those of us who weren’t Anglos.

Yet collective memory can change the more stories are told, and with the rise of technology and the call for more diverse and inclusive views, we are looking to rewrite how we represent the past.

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During the decades the collection haunted McCombs, there were a variety of opinions about housing this collection on our campus. Some saw it as a privilege to present these rare historical artifacts, being complacent with the lack of context presented with the objects or the implicitly colonialist project of an Anglo like Red McCombs collecting them. Most people would walk right through the area and maybe notice that it was there, but pay no real attention.

When I asked current students about their opinions about the display, there were a lot of students who would say something like, “I always thought it was cool that we had it. But I never looked at it.” But some did take notice and were discomforted by the collection.

In an interview with Lee Roche ’22, they recalled their initial thoughts on the Collection. Finding preserved and celebrated weapons in the student center worried them, especially with the recent political climate and the multiple school shootings taking place. With the way the Collection gathered artifacts from Native American peoples as if they were trophies, it also made Lee wary of Southwestern’s ‘inclusive’ & ‘diverse’ advertising. We walked through it together just before it was removed, and the overall comment from them was, “It’s giving some seriously racist vibes.”

All Universities and other places of importance and community have identities. Identities are shaped by their practices, ideals, employees, and what they present on their campuses. Southwestern has always made its identity about being prestigious and well-rounded.

Southwestern has also always claimed to be, at the least, inclusive. As other Placing Memory entries document more fully, SU had a peaceful integration in the late sixties and has been releasing inclusion statements since the 1970s. Southwestern works to provide a diverse and inclusive experience, but at the end of the day, the school is still in the South and in Texas. And despite the multiple efforts to try and recruit more diverse students and faculty, they have remained the minority with the lowest retention rate.

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The Red & Charline McCombs Frontier Americana Collection was added in 1998, with plans to rotate to something else within two years, but it was never rotated. No one here now seems to know why that is, and research into the archive on this subject makes its longevity seem even more bizarre.

From the very beginning of the collection showing up on campus, it stirred strong feelings among minoritized students and their allies on campus. In an opinion article written in the Megaphone by Jane Valera in October of 1998, she stated, “How are students of Spanish descent supposed to feel when a skull of a 35-year-old Spanish woman with an arrow still lodged in her cranium sits casually on a glass shelf?”

For 25 years, as students of color walked down the hallway holding this collection, they had no choice but to be reminded that they have been seen as lesser by so many. Here, in the student center, in a place that sought to be a place of belonging, they were forced to see that people that looked like them had been dominated twice—first when they were forced to surrender their home lands and artifacts and then again when they were symbolically annihilated by having those pieces put on display for others to gawk at without thinking of them as fellow humans.

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In 2017, Red McCombs was interviewed by the San Antonio Express-News about his much larger Frontier Americana Collection from which the collection at Southwestern was taken, asking why he chose to collect these weapons and conquest-related items. He said that what fascinated him was that these artifacts were a part of “who was here before we were here.” Even that statement centers whiteness.

Students, faculty, and staff have been calling for the removal of the collection since it first opened in 1998. With an assurance that the exhibit would be rotated every two years, the initial concerns died down. But as the years passed and the protests continued and nothing ever happened, a sense of hopelessness set in.

The exhibit was not removed until the fall of 2023, and when it happened there was only a brief campus-wide email from the President announcing the removal, one that did not acknowledge the decades of activism focused on its removal or the harm that was created by its ongoing presence on campus.

The year before, multiple racist incidents were happening on campus. Slurs were written on doors, a noose was hung in a bathroom, and anti-Semitic posters were put up around campus. Students began to lash back at the administration, demanding more recognition and a more direct response from the administration in looking to find the people who perpetrated the racist acts and working to earn its rhetoric of inclusion with inclusive acts.

This prompted more questions about our campus history and how we represent it, and was the impetus for the Placing Memory project itself. But as I found in my research for this entry, these concerns are not new at all. In the same Megaphone article from 1998, Valera says, “Administrators have made the priorities of the ‘powers that be’ eminently clear. Red McCombs, the Brown Family, and the other rich supporters… are of superior importance to the students and faculty of this university.”

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As a legacy student myself, I have been hearing stories of Southwestern from my mother for as long as I can remember. I heard about how amazing and life-changing SU is, and how the administration is always willing to help as long as you ask for it. But as a student of Hispanic descent, I am tuned into these questions in a particular way.

I firmly believe that SU is amazing and life-changing, but there is still so much that is wrong with the way the school is run. The Frontier Americana Collection was only supposed to be up for 2 years. Instead, it was up for 25. Students, staff, and faculty asked for it to be removed multiple times, or at least changed. The collection was only taken down when Red McCombs died in 2023, when the family requested the return of them to unify the whole collection.

Southwestern has worked to create an inclusive identity, providing scholarships for minorities and implementing diversity and inclusion training and statements. At the end of the day, the school will never be able to deliver on that promise until it can stand up to influential donors and Board members to say that what is good for them is not always good for us.

There is reason to be hopeful, while still being wary. Currently, the display cases that used to house the McCombs collection celebrating settler-colonialism are empty. A little sign in one of them promises that they will soon be filled with student-produced exhibits. Time will tell.

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