POCUMTUCK STATE PARK: Morphic Resonance & Trauma-Forged Repair in Decolonial Landscape Architecture

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:Pocumtuck State Park’s Morphic Reckoning ~ Park Description

Pocumtuck State Park is envisioned as a living landscape of resurgence and reconciliation—an open-source arboretum and cultural sanctuary extending across Western Massachusetts. Rooted in the Deerfield Valley along the winding Deerfield River, this emergent park system transforms underutilized public and private lands into a cohesive web of ecological corridors, memorial gardens, sculptural landmarks, and connective trails. It overlays lost trolley paths from the early 20th century with new meaning, linking Amherst and Northampton northward to the Vermont border and beyond. In its conceptual geometry, the park forms a living cross: an east-west corridor committed to Indigenous resurgence intersecting a north-south axis dedicated to Black liberation. These axes ground the project in local histories while inviting restorative futures, encouraging visitors to experience the valley as both sanctuary and teacher

Flowing outward from this central vision, the park’s connective geometry extends along the historic trolley and river corridors of Western Massachusetts. These twin networks—the iron veins of the early industrial age and the watercourses that long predated them—become the skeletal and circulatory systems of a new kind of regional organism. Where tracks once moved raw materials and bodies through a landscape of extraction, the same alignments now move remembrance and repair.

At the easternmost limit of the old trolley grid lies the Quabbin Reservoir, where the hydrological and industrial histories converge. The reservoir—engineered to quench Boston’s thirst—submerged entire towns, erasing generations of local memory beneath its still surface. Yet its very existence makes visible the tension the park seeks to heal: the channeling of nature for human use, the silencing of Indigenous and rural voices in the name of modernity. Quabbin thus forms the symbolic terminus of the Hawk Trail, a vast mirror where water’s memory holds what land once held. Beneath its surface lie preserved foundations of homes, churches, and town greens—an underwater archive of displacement. The reservoir becomes an eastern threshold for the Pocumtuck system: a reminder that every act of progress carries the shadow of erasure, and that the work of atonement must extend as far as the floodwaters reached.

Here the mission of the Mohican–Mohawk Recreation Trail returns in reflection—river to ridge to river again—its 100-mile vision of continuity echoing beneath Quabbin’s surface. What the state once framed as recreation becomes re-sanctified as remembrance: a hydrological pilgrimage that retraces the very migrations and exchanges that shaped the valley for millennia. The Pocumtuck framework inherits this lineage, transforming the Commonwealth’s trail ethos into a ceremony of reconnection. The act of hiking, paddling, or biking is no longer leisure but liturgy; each footprint presses awareness into the soil of shared history. In this way, the Massachusetts Greenways network is reimagined not as infrastructure but as inheritance—a living archive of movement across time.

At the crossings of former trolley lines and waterways, new Ghost Frames emerge—architectural skeletons that mark sites of cultural amnesia and invite participatory atonement. Each frame anchors a node of living history, where visitors encounter art, ecology, and story braided together. A plaque or augmented-reality marker links the site to others in the network: a constellation of about a dozen spirit frames scattered across the valley. You may begin anywhere—Shelburne Falls, Amherst, Florence, Turners Falls—and find your way by resonance rather than direction.

One of the most luminous of these nodes is Three Sisters Sanctuary in Goshen. Built upon a landscape of blasted stone left from highway construction, the sanctuary was sculpted by hand into a mosaic of gardens, mosaics, and guardian figures. It stands at the confluence of personal grief and collective renewal: its creator dedicated it to his three daughters, while its very name echoes the Indigenous agricultural triad of corn, beans, and squash—the Three Sisters. In this dual meaning, the sanctuary becomes a perfect manifestation of the park’s ethic: trauma transformed into teaching, memory into matter, and sorrow into living soil. As part of the Ghost Frame Network, Three Sisters Sanctuary functions as a western beacon in the trolley-waterway constellation, its existing sculptural landscape serving as both precedent and partner in the broader Morphic Reckoning.

Together, these sites form a braided, self-referential system—a living neural map—in which water, path, and story converge. The trolley beds act as axons; rivers as arteries; ghost frames as synapses where memory fires back into circulation. What results is not a linear trail but a self-healing circuit: a morphic field of reconciliation where every restored landscape strengthens the resonance of all the others.

The east-west corridor is called the Hawk Trail, replacing the outdated “Mohawk Trail” name that historically displaced the local Pocumtuck, Abenaki, Nipmuc, and Mohican peoples in favor of distant tribes. The hawk embodies vision, vigilance, and renewal—qualities expressed in sentinel mounds, interpretive zones, and forested overlooks that trace ancestral presence along Route 2. The trail overlays historic trolley systems like the Connecticut Valley Street Railway and Berkshire Street Railway, whose expansions coincided with a fraught period of white supremacy and racialized exclusions. What once advanced dispossession becomes a reactivated pathway toward justice. Through georeferencing in QGIS, these rail-to-trail alignments emerge as dendritic neural pathways—nodes as synapses, trails as nerves—sustaining a distributed brain and circulatory network across the region. At the intersecting north-south axis, the Sojourner Truth corridor travels from Florence, where the abolitionist icon lived and spoke, to Shelburne Falls and further north, honoring Black movement, endurance, and ascent. Its interpretive markers illuminate histories of racial terror—including cross-burnings on Shelburne hillsides—and recognize the presence of Black community members whose stories remain largely unacknowledged.

In honoring and transforming the legacy of the Mohican–Mohawk Recreation Trail, Pocumtuck State Park embraces the state’s original mission—to link river’s edge to mountain ridge and back again—while expanding its frame from recreation to reconciliation. The DCR’s vision of a continuous, 100-mile cultural corridor between the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers becomes here a corridor of repair: the same Deerfield and Hoosic watersheds that once moved trade and timber now move memory, ceremony, and ecological renewal. Every mile of the trail holds an ancestral story; every ridge and ford becomes a page in a living archive. Where the Commonwealth describes a journey from valley to summit, Pocumtuck adds the inner ascent—from colonial naming to Indigenous reawakening, from tourist gaze to reciprocal care.

The Park’s Morphic Reckoning reinterprets the Massachusetts Greenways network as an energetic field of shared custodianship. It integrates DCR’s trail stewardship partners—the Deerfield River Watershed Association, the Franklin County Land Trust, the Berkshire Natural Resources Council, and others—into a new alliance grounded in Land Back and Rematriation principles. In this model, maintenance becomes ceremony; “trail etiquette” evolves into ecological ethics. The generosity of landowners who grant passage is reframed as participation in cultural atonement. Thus, the Mohican–Mohawk Trail and the Hawk Trail do not compete—they resonate across time. The state’s original mission of connectivity becomes the deeper mission of continuity: a bridge between policy and prophecy, between statecraft and soulcraft.

The intersection of these two living axes forms the cultural and ecological heart of the park. Here, the Quadrafecta at Route 112 and Route 2 becomes a central governance and gathering hub—a brain for coordination and remembrance, paired with Salmon Crossing as the heart pumping reciprocity throughout the watershed. This is where monumental guardians Greylock and Mashalisk stand watch. Greylock, a 40-foot chromed masculine warrior forged from industrial debris, invokes Wawanotewat (Grey Lock), the Missisquoi Abenaki war leader who defied colonial conquest during Dummer’s War; the British built Fort Dummer specifically to capture him, a fortress that grew into the city of Brattleboro. Mashalisk, at 35 feet, embodies the Pocumtuck matriarchal lineage of diplomacy, trade, and resistance under colonial pressure. Between them, a National Indigenous Awareness Center uses holographic storytelling and responsive touch displays to share living cultural knowledge. Above, a corten steel Hawk sculpture rises atop a reclaimed pedestal, marking this node as the park’s emblematic sanctuary of resurgence.

At Salmon Crossing, near the waterfalls and potholes, the Sachem Salmon leaps 25 feet into view—its body welded from reclaimed cutlery to honor both the fish’s role as a teacher of reciprocity and the river’s industrial history. Beneath this sentinel lies a walkable pavement map of the greater park system, offering orientation to the neural network of nodes and trails. Nearby stands the Sixty Square Sphere: sixty polished black stones housed within a stainless icosahedral lattice of sixty squares—sacred geometry honoring the sixty Black residents driven from Shelburne in the 1880s during the period of trolley line expansion. Its recursive construction embodies healing without erasure, aligning with the park’s tri-elemental totems: hawk (air/vision), salmon (water/reciprocity), salamander (earth/regeneration).

Across the river, the Cutlery Arboretum restores an ancient fishing ground where salmon once returned in abundance. Cattails, milkweed, pickerelweed, and arrowhead reclaim the banks as bioremediated water cells support spawning habitat and habitat reclamation. Ledger stones track ecological progress in real time, creating seasonal stewardship jobs and eco-tourism roles. Anchoring the ground is the Red Salamander, a mythic stone sculpture whose spiral tail symbolizes regeneration and guardianship of the earth. Visitors participate directly in restoration by pulling invasives like Japanese knotweed and replanting native species, becoming agents in the land’s ongoing repair.

Along the north-south axis, the Bridge of Flowers becomes a Black Reconciliation Hub. The Spirit Trolley Trellis arches overhead—a ghost structure of the Shelburne Falls & Colrain Street Railway rendered in translucent steel and flourishing with vines. Interpretive plaques narrate stories of Black endurance and contributions to local life, while bronze markers along North Street identify historic KKK fire sites with resident testimony and symbolic flame-mimicking light posts illuminating serviceberry and elderberry plantings. Co-stewardship by Black-led groups transforms a once-exclusionary civic symbol into a corridor of shared remembrance and inclusion.

Ten miles west, the Hail to the Sunrise statue in Charlemont becomes a teaching site through a circle of black locust benches and four-language interpretation explaining its displacement of Mohawk culture and the need for truthful representation. This smaller node remains part of the Hawk Trail network, broadening the park’s historical literacy and ecological care.

Throughout the park, the Aesthetic of the Forge serves as a moral geometry. Welded guardians from industrial wreckage do not merely beautify—they confront. Chrome surfaces do not reflect the object; they reflect the viewer, forcing a reckoning with one’s place in both past harm and future restoration. 

Earlier forged works across the region—the Brooktrout in Greenfield, the Sturgeon at the Culinary Institute of America, the River Bench and Pothole Fountain on the Bridge of Flowers, the Minuteman Crossing in Amherst—appear now as prophetic fragments, precursors to a landscape-scale transformation. What extraction dismantled, forging returns to life. Metal remembers. In the mirrored face of Greylock or Mashalisk, there is no spectator. There is only participation.

Pocumtuck State Park is structured to advance Land Back principles through Indigenous-led and Black-led stewardship councils, shifting operational burdens from municipalities to those with cultural sovereignty.

The park becomes an economic generator through programming rooted in ecology, culture, tourism, and storytelling—hawk watches, salmon runs, restoration workshops, reconciliation circles—creating a cyclical economy of care.

The drowned towns of the Quabbin remain the most literal manifestation of a region’s submerged past. In them we see the physicalization of forgetting—the quiet, depthless erasure that the Pocumtuck vision seeks to surface and speak back into being. Where the Quabbin holds its history underwater, Pocumtuck State Park invites that memory to breathe again, transforming the reservoir’s silence into a call for collective witnessing.

The result is a helical sanctuary blueprint set for free public release on November 15, 2025—an adaptive atlas of encyclopedic detail. Every visitor becomes a steward, every steward part of the restoration. In them we see the physicalization of forgetting—the quiet, depthless erasure that the Pocumtuck vision seeks to surface and speak back into being. Where the Quabbin holds its history underwater, Pocumtuck State Park invites that memory to breathe again, transforming the reservoir’s silence into a call for collective witnessing. Justice flows like water through the watershed, forging community in the fire of accountability. From trauma’s landscape rises a place where the living earth remembers, heals, and welcomes all into its ongoing story. In the guardian’s chrome, we are reflected—not separate from the land’s wounds but woven into its renewal. 

The hawk circles, the salmon returns, the salamander rises again, the land itself becomes the record, the classroom, the witness.  Trails function as mnemonic pathways; artworks serve as portals into accountability; the river is treated not as scenery but as a relation whose wellbeing determines our own. The entire system operates as a living memory network—neuronal in structure—where every node is a synapse firing knowledge back into circulation.

Pocumtuck State Park argues that reconciliation is not symbolic. It requires the physical return of land to Indigenous caretakers. It demands public recognition of those whose livelihoods and futures were stolen. It calls for the re-establishment of ecological flows that colonization disrupted and industry suppressed. By treating the valley as a shared responsibility rather than a contested possession, the park creates a future in which healing is a civic obligation and participation in stewardship is understood as part of belonging.

This is not a park one merely visits. It is a park one enters into relationship with. It is an act of acknowledgment that becomes an act of repair, and a structure of repair that becomes a new way of living here—together.

John F. Sendelbach ~ Shelburne Falls, MA ~ 413.559.7183 ~ Join the Morphic Reckoning! ~ www.johnsendelbach.com

TRANSCRIPT FROM ABOVE VIDEO:

Hi everyone, John Sendelbach here and I'm showing up. I'm doing the work, reflecting myself back on the world through the instrument of cultural destruction, the automobile. I'm on the Mohawk Trail in Charlemont. I'm at the site of Mohawk Park. Hail to the sunrise. We're in the foothills of the Berkshires. It's a cold, windy, rainy day.

And shout out to my good friend for supplying me with this photograph of this very site from 1932. And it's a fascinating picture. This monument was installed by an organization called the Improved Order of Red Men. And as you can see, there's probably not a single red man here or any person of color. in 1932 was ground zero for KKK dev involvement in western Massachusetts.

I recently acquired this interesting collection of local literature that I hope to share with my friend who hooked me up with this picture today. I walk in the footsteps of Chief Greylock, the famous decolonist who fought for his people. Pocumtuck of Woronoco descent. walking the same ground as the Abenaki, the Nipmuc, and the Mohican. He was a Pocumtuck and he hid in northern Vermont and came down with his sorties and killed the colonists. Probably murdered hundreds of people with his bare hands. and his reward for defending this culture that was finally decimated in 1730 which laid the entire American people to rest. He retreated to Canada, converted to Christianity and lived a long life and died of old age.

Now, this man is an archetype for the culture that's laid in ruins. And the Mohawk Trail is exemplary of that destruction when they misnomer the trail and built it up so automobiles could drive out. that symbolize the final destruction of the indigenous culture and the eternal overlay of the colonist system.

And so I've entered the morphic field of Chief Greylock. and possess his decolonist spirit which embibes me as we speak. And this sculpture of a Mohawk Indian hail to the sunrise is a beautiful piece. It's a fine representation of the man and of the culture. It just happens to be about a 100 miles too far east because these people only use the place for travel, warring, hunting and fishing and commerce.

But unlike the fiberglass big Indian that was a fully embedded cultural artifact for the modernday indigeny anybody who grew up here their culture was torn away and sent to Oklahoma perhaps to damage another region of people create more division. This Mohawk Indian is now going to become a touchstone of understanding and it becomes a micro site of the larger Pocumtuck State Park which occupies eyes. several sites within Shelburne Falls and fulfills a larger goal of the Massachusetts Greenway system and connectivity landback initiatives.

The morphic resonance has arrived and I happen to be the channel through which it was transmitted. And as I will detail in my forthcoming thesis, my whole life's work has been prototypical for the development of this concept. Pocumtuck State Park is formulated based on a complex pedagogic rationale that advances the fields of psychology in the field of landscape architecture. It provides a new lens to view morphically misaligned environments. in order to in order to identify and transmogrify the harm into healing. And you're going to have to read the 250 pages to figure that out for yourself. But all you need to know is what's in your heart, man.

This isn't a proposal or a manifesto. This is an unassailable juggernaut that makes everyone a hero who hops on the back of the giant guardian hawk. As we're now renaming the Mohawk Trail, the Hawk Trail to reclaim the sovereignty are the people who occupied this land but preserve the relevance of the hawk within the name of Mohawk. The hawk now becomes the guardian of the sky. He's part of a trilogy of overseers which include the sachem salmon who guides us all. As long as you're open to the information and he will guide you through the trauma, through the gauntlet, you will come out the other side. A spirit warrior seeking peace.

10 miles east will be the National Center for Indigenous Awareness. Two state sites straddling the Deerfield River at one of the dams that choked the salmon to death. There two monumental sculptures exist as overseers looking over the river where the mythical sachem salmon exists. And they tell the story of the destruction and the return of the culture as they emerge from the earth constructed of the very industrial transportation energy related debris that signaled the death of their culture.

The very sight it's now cloverleaf at the intersection of route 2 and route 112 becomes a cultural burial mound as they blasted and dug the natives land prudent dump trucks and unceremoniously removed it leaving behind central mound which was the core of this idea at inception that Chief Greylock emerges from the mound like a transformer built of the elements of cultural destruction rising up in brilliant chrome detail for the viewer to reflect back on himself.

The space he occupies now has belonged to everyone. But the indigenous cultures were silenced and marginalized and thrown to the wayside. So organizations like the Improved Order of Red Men could put up this monstrosity of a monument. The sculpture is beautiful, but it needs to be contextualized for humanity.

The National Center for Indigenous Awareness contains worldclass interactive displays. Touch a screen and you can hang out with Mashulisk, the famous settler of arguments. Another the gender duality of the Pocumtuck which are the archetype of the entire indigenous population not only in the region but on the continent and expand it globally. This becomes the center, the flagship, touchstone, turnkey. It can be replicated anywhere. Transform damaged morphic landscape into a space of reconciliation and healing and returning that morphic field to its original goodness.

This morphic field perpetuates throughout history and throughout time, throughout space. Look at the structure women's clubs. You see that they marginalized blacks, people of color, indigenous people while they're fighting for suffrage rights for themselves, they're discriminating against everybody else. And today we have committee which appears who've never had a person of color which has excluded men because of their insular framework.

The Bridge of Flowers becomes part of the land back initiative. You don't need nine people on a committee governing an 18x400 garden. Speaking as a lifelong landscape designer builder, graduate in Cornell with a horticulture degree, I can manage that bridge myself. Okay? I wouldn't even need the gardeners. I can weed that thing in two days. I love the flower brigade and the volunteer aspect is where the heart was. But the bridge itself as a space is out of tune. Its morphic resonance is misaligned to the white supremacist ideal that built the town, that chased away a community of black people in the late 1800s, that then cross burnings on North Street as detailed to me by local residents who retain it in their own cultural memory as stories told to them by their elders. very likely the men who are involved and the women in the building of the trolley bridge and the eventual conversion to the flower bridge which is a beautiful thing but the channel is misaligned and you can see it has perpetuated into 2025.

When you read my personal story, today my thesis understand the gond guided me through. [Music] And it was the salmon who initiated the works that would presage this grand scheme. And I am merely a channel. I've simply opened a door to a new field that was always there. Just like anybody who makes a mathematical discovery, it's not theirs. It's part of the public domain and I'm merely torn the roof off.

The central part of this park is a land that's owned portion by Josh Simpson and Cady Coleman. And in my opinion, it is a less favorable arrangement they have with the town. And I think it would be in everyone's interest to land back that site. It becomes the heart of the state park. Monumental sculpture of the Sachem of Salmon with a high-end urban plaza with a walkable map that shows the entire park directs you acts as a signpost to tell you where to go and you can learn all about things on that site which is directly attached to the sachem salmon stronghold which is above the dam in Shelburne Falls under the bridges and that's when he came to me first and I was in my studio on 44 state street for nine years. Sachem salmon came to me and said, "Create a myth." And so I did. Little did I know that salmon was the soothsayer that would guide me through the turmoil to transcend to become a teacher of my teachers. Josh and Cady could lend immense credence if they did a land back.

It straddles the Deerfield River where the peace treaty was where the Indians said let's not kill each other one day's walking distance from here because it's good fishing exemplary ideology that replicated all around the world cuz there should be good fishing everywhere literally or metaphorically.

Across the river is the old cutlery mill powered by the dam. The very symbol, not even the symbol, the literal physical object that terminated salmon run in conjunction with all the other dams down to the entire ocean. That site is in desperate need of remediation. It's polluted. It's full of sharp objects. And it's too dangerous to let the public there. And this is, in my opinion, belongs to the National Trust. And in its state, it's a slap in the face. of all the nations who made that treaty. It's a toxic waste site whose morphic history was peace for food.

This is the strongest part of this initiative is the land back in the mill property. return it to indigenous and black leadership. It becomes the heart of the arboretum. The whole park is an arboretum. begin to replace the invasive species with native species, which is a perfect metaphor for returning the environment to the morphic resonance that originated. In fact, my book will have a page with wildflower seeds you can rip out and plant for your own personal atonement. And you can be a hero and everyone can be a hero. And the world will shift and the new lens has been provided by the Sachem salmon who guides us all.

And the third guiding totem is a salamander. The red salamander that I already have halfway built over at the mill. I believe it was a cosmic imperative that I even started doing that. I didn't even know what was happening and it literally emerged from the site. That salamander becomes the representation of the remediation of the land. Sachem salmon oversees the water and the hawk. The totem of the newly monikered Hawk Trail oversees the air. You have the air, water, and land. And those three totems become the graph of representation throughout the park.

Now we spread it out to the regional scale and we form across the east west hawk trail. which represents the manifest destiny of the colonists which created even more and more pressure on the indigenous cultures. It crosses with the northwest axis that starts it sojourner truth and leads north to the bridge of flowers.

At the Bridge Street/Deerfield Ave site, the central site emerges a geodesic form of 60 squares with 60 black rocks representing the 60 black people that got chased away. The sacred geometry aligns perfectly with the recursive nature of the morphic field and reality itself. And it's another manifestation of salmon guiding me through the understanding of sacred geometry. And if you look at my website, you can see all of this presaged the Pocumtuck State Park. And it was merely a matter of getting run through the gauntlet to being abused, harassed all the way up to the top of the court system. Just like Rhonda Anderson proclaims invisiblization, I've become the real life archetype for the invisibilization. Just like the fiberglass Indian that's now possibly damaging people Oklahoma has left division in this community in this wake. We can heal that. It will bring peace and harmony back to the landscape, and the new people that flow through will not be trapped in that legacy. And that will be the ultimate testament of the state park: Land remediation, cultural reform... becomes inevitable, nontransmutable. unassailable.

Here we have the train coming through. You can hear the roar of it industrial pollution. spewing its diesel fumes out of the air once breathed by infinite generations.

And we all have some atonement in our future. Thank you for listening. I give this freely to the people. This is open source, delivered to me by entities unknown and it belongs to everyone. Pocumtuck State Park, Massachusetts, the first park for landscape atonement.