In the wake of the current controversies surrounding civil war monuments, the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation released a new policy explaining their mission and goals moving forward.

“We received a lot of calls, from a lot of people from one end of the valley to the other, asking us what we are going to do, to preserve and protect the monuments in the valley,” Keven Walker of  Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation says. 

The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation manages over 20 battlefields and about 50 civil war monuments over an eight county area. In light of the controversies surrounding confederate monuments across the country, they have responded by pointing out the mission and long term goals of the foundation. 

“What we don’t believe, as difficult as some of those issues are, that removing them serves a purpose, I don’t think it changes the horrible things that happened, but it also limits our ability to look at those with a balanced,nuanced eye,” Terry Heder of the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation says. 

The battlefields foundation plans to preserve confederate monuments, but also advocates for the addition of monuments which address slavery, reconstruction, the Jim Crow era , and Civil Rights Acts. 

“We don’t believe that those monuments should stand alone, that new interpretations should be established to put the monuments in context so people can understand the full context of not only what happened during the civil war, but what happened from civil war to civil rights.” Walker says. 

The foundation believes that the monuments help telling stories of the past much more enriching and engaging.

“They’re also among other things, they’re signifiers, when you look at a civil war site, if there’s no monument, no interpretation, marker , no historic fencing there it can look like just another piece of land,” Heder says. 

The foundation plans to not only focus on preserving monuments in the valley and advocating for new ones that tell a broader story, they say they are considering proposals to relocate monuments that have been taken down in other places, if they are significant to the valley, and they plan to host a conference on confederate icons, to get people more comfortable with having the discussion.

“Battlefields and the monuments that can commemorate what happened on them , remind us that that its hard to be a democracy and we’ve got to keep talking to eachother.” Walker says. 

The battlefields foundation plans to host that conference in January of 2018.