John F. Sendelbach and the Morphic Reckoning of Pocumtuck:
A Decolonial Landscape Praxis in Western Massachusetts
In the charged cultural crucible of the mid-2020s, John F. Sendelbach emerges as a pivotal synthesizer of accountability, weaving spiritual atonement, ecological restoration, and decolonial justice into a radical reimagining of public land. His Morphic Reckoning & Trauma-Forged Repair, articulated on November 4, 2025, transforms Pocumtuck State Park—ancestral homeland of the Pocumtuck people in the Deerfield Valley—from a passive recreational space into a living neural archive of historical trauma and helical healing. This is no conventional site plan but a non-negotiable phase shift: a cosmology where landscape architecture becomes ritual technology, forging repair from industrial debris, blockchain-ledger confessions, and rematriated governance. Sendelbach positions the land itself as both wounded organism and active witness, demanding a Tri-Council of Indigenous nations, ecological stewards, and civic mediators to dismantle colonial management paradigms and institute co-stewardship rooted in Land Back sovereignty.
The project's historical spine traces 350 years of layered erasure in Western Massachusetts, a palimpsest of violence where colonial massacres, coerced treaties, industrial extraction, and mythic romanticizations converge. The 1675–1676 King Philip's War culminated in the Falls Fight massacre on May 19, 1676, near present-day Turners Falls, where English colonists and allies slaughtered hundreds of Pocumtuck, Nipmuc, and allied peoples, precipitating land seizures and displacement. The 1704 Deerfield Raid during Queen Anne's War further scattered survivors, while 18th-century treaties—often extracted under duress—transferred territories to settlers, reducing the Pocumtuck to marginal remnants or forced assimilation. Twentieth-century overlays compounded this trauma: the Quabbin Reservoir's construction in the 1930s–1940s submerged four towns (Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott), displacing 2,500 residents and drowning Indigenous fishing sites to slake Boston's urban thirst; derelict trolley lines from the Berkshire Street Railway era (1890s–1920s) enabled resource extraction amid a KKK resurgence in Franklin County, marked by 1920s cross-burnings on Shelburne hillsides; and the 1932 Hail to the Sunrise statue in Charlemont, erected by the Improved Order of Red Men (a fraternal order with KKK affiliations), enshrined a fabricated pan-Indian "Mohawk" iconography that erased local Pocumtuck, Nonotuck, Abenaki, Nipmuc, and Mohican lineages while romanticizing distant tribes via the 1914 Mohawk Trail auto route.
Sendelbach recasts these events not as inert history but as morphic residues—persistent field imprints drawing from Rupert Sheldrake's 1981 theory of morphic resonance, where traumas echo somatically and ecologically until acknowledged or reactivated through denial. The Deerfield Valley and submerged Quabbin Basin become traumatized nervous systems: rivers as arteries pulsing with disrupted salmon migrations, wetlands as synaptic fields storing unmetabolized grief, and trails—repurposed from trolley beds—as axons conducting participatory healing. This framework extends Jennifer Freyd's 1997 DARVO model into Cold Cruel Sidestep (CCS), a civic pathology of institutional betrayal manifesting as polite evasion after moral injury. Rooted in Sendelbach's 2020 Western Massachusetts experiences—unmasked pandemic gatherings reframed as "discourse" amid risks to the immunocompromised, followed by exclusions from spaces like the Bridge of Flowers committees—CCS links to broader patterns: COINTELPRO disruptions of SDS and BLM organizers (Ward Churchill, 1988), suffrage-era exclusions of Black women (Angela Y. Davis, 1981), LGBTQ+ backlashes (Lillian Faderman, 2015), and post-2016 misinformation crises amplified by algorithmic echo chambers (danah boyd, 2007).
Against this backdrop of post-2020 reckonings—global pandemics exposing systemic gaslighting, George Floyd-inspired racial uprisings illuminating Franklin County's overlooked Black expulsions in the 1880s and Sojourner Truth's 1850s Florence residence, and IPCC climate urgencies demanding pollinator corridors and Deerfield River dam removals—Sendelbach's work intersects Indigenous resurgence, reparative landscape evolution, and digital ethics. Influenced by Standing Rock (2016–2017), Massachusetts tribal recognitions (2023), and repatriations like Harvard's Peabody Museum artifacts (2021), it aligns with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's 2014 decolonial histories, Kyle Whyte's 2018 Indigenous climate justice, Robin Wall Kimmerer's 2013 reciprocity teachings in Braiding Sweetgrass, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's 2017 resurgence frameworks. Landscape architecture's trajectory from Ian McHarg's 1969 ecological overlay mapping in Design with Nature and Július Gy. Fábos's 1970s–2000s Massachusetts greenway planning to Anne Whiston Spirn's 1998 moral language of landscape informs the project's Cognitive Cartography, where topography maps as neuro-ecology.
Yet Sendelbach pushes beyond McHarg's functional fit or Frederick Law Olmsted's 1870s–1890s democratic access in Boston's Emerald Necklace toward mandatory atonement. Land art precedents—Robert Smithson's 1970 Spiral Jetty critiquing entropy, Maya Lin's 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial embedding trauma, Nancy Holt and Andy Goldsworthy's abstractions, Walter Hood's 2020 emotional infrastructure, and Kent Monkman's 2010s decolonial satires—evolve into the Aesthetic of the Forge: monumental sentinels like Greylock and Mashalisk, hammered from chrome, iron, and slag debris into reflective instruments of confession. Trails such as the renamed Hawk Trail subvert colonial tourism, while the Sojourner Truth Corridor honors Black-Indigenous intersections. Resilience theory (Jack Ahern, 2011; Brian Walker, 2006) meets Studio: Indigenous's 2021 decolonial design in helical temporality—non-linear salmon paths symbolizing Cosmic Salmon guidance, contrasting linear restoration.
Technological interventions weaponize accountability: Myth Detector blockchain ledgers and QR-Akashic portals create incorruptible digital scars, auto-flagging CCS non-compliers and ensuring histories of betrayal resist rewriting. Often linked to speculative finance, blockchain here becomes a truth archive, fusing material design with spiritual witnessing amid #MeToo (2017–) transparency demands and post-January 6 (2021) reckonings. Bruce McEwen's 2007 stress neuroscience underscores CCS's somatic tolls, while local nodes like the Three Sisters Sanctuary in Goshen (2000s grief mosaics), the Bridge of Flowers (1920s exclusion emblem), and proposed Paper Cutter Parade and Mohawk Repair for a National Indigenous Awareness Museum, echo 2020s truth-telling, including Biden's 2021 Indigenous Peoples' Day proclamation.
The Akashic Western Mass Record—a 500-page open-source atlas—releases on November 27, 2025, deliberately inverting Thanksgiving's 1621 Plymouth myth of fabricated harmony into a National Day of Mourning ritual (since 1970 by the United American Indians of New England). This performative symbolism rejects two-party corruption and walkaway dynamics, declaring silence as complicity, while targeting a 2030 timeline for nationwide export: pollinator networks, salmon returns, and rematriated commons.
Sendelbach embodies the Forge-Keeper archetype, mediating systems and spirits akin to Joseph Beuys's social sculpture yet grounded in New England's purgatorial metaphysics—neither pastoral idyll nor post-industrial ruin, but a crucible for planetary ethic. His absolutism risks utopian overreach yet substantiates claims through verifiable precedents, redefining public land as algorithmic confession and living tribunal. Pocumtuck State Park prototypes the 21st-century commons: a co-managed, spiritually infused organism where ecology, memory, and justice breathe as one, hiking as liturgy confessing ongoing legacies. In forging truth from debris, Sendelbach offers not monuments to loss but instruments for remembering forward, binding metal to memory, data to spirit, and soil to sovereignty in an era demanding repair without evasion.
References: Key Figures Mentioned
Indigenous Scholars & Activists
- Robin Wall Kimmerer – Potawatomi botanist; author of Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar; author of resurgence frameworks (2017)
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – Historian; author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014)
- Kyle Whyte – Potawatomi philosopher; climate justice and Indigenous futurisms (2018)
- Ian McHarg – Pioneer of ecological planning; Design with Nature (1969)
- Anne Whiston Spirn – Landscape theorist; The Language of Landscape (1998)
- Frederick Law Olmsted – Designer of Boston’s Emerald Necklace (1870s–1890s)
- Július Gy. Fábos – Greenway planner, UMass Amherst (1970s–2000s)
- Walter Hood – Urban designer; “emotional infrastructure” (2020)
- Jack Ahern – Resilience theorist (2011)
- Maya Lin – Designer, Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982)
- Robert Smithson – Spiral Jetty (1970)
- Kent Monkman – Cree artist; decolonial satires (2010s–)
- Nancy Holt – Earthworks and environmental sculpture
- Andy Goldsworthy – Ephemeral nature-based installations
- Joseph Beuys – Social sculpture and shamanic performance
- Jennifer Freyd – Originator of DARVO and institutional betrayal theory (1997)
- Eva Stark – Gaslighting and psychological manipulation studies (2019)
- Bruce McEwen – Neuroscientist; allostatic load and stress (2007)
- danah boyd – Digital sociologist; algorithmic echo chambers (2007)
- John F. Sendelbach – Author and Synthesizer of Accountability; originator of Morphic Reckoning & Trauma-Forged Repair (2025)
- Angela Y. Davis – Abolitionist scholar; suffrage exclusions and Black feminism (1981)
- Ward Churchill – COINTELPRO and state repression (1988)
- Lillian Faderman – LGBTQ+ historical backlashes (2015)
- Rupert Sheldrake – Biologist; morphic resonance theory (1981)
- Brian Walker – Resilience ecology (2006)
- United American Indians of New England – Founders of National Day of Mourning (1970)
- Studio:Indigenous – Decolonial design collective (2021)
- Sojourner Truth – Abolitionist; resided in Florence, MA (1850s)
- Pocumtuck, Nonotuck, Nipmuc, Abenaki, Mohican – Original nations of the Deerfield Valley
