Condescension face: Rhonda Anderson,
Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs,
mention her name, and the eyes roll....because Rhonda knows best!
TIM GRANT: MISSING THE ‘COLORFUL STATUESQUE NATIVE AMERICAN CHIEF ALONG THE MOHAWK TRAIL’
June 27, 2026
Letter writer Brad Brigham misses the “colorful statuesque Native American chief along the Mohawk Trail in Shelburne Falls,” and so do I. I liked going to the Mohawk Drive-In in the early 80s when I was a teen and seeing the chief before a double feature. Those were good times.
Normal people never had a problem with “Big Indian,” but the woke crowd became offended. If these malcontents had just ignored the chief, he would still be standing in Shelburne Falls. But liberals have always got to throw a fit until they get their way. I can hear President Trump now: “These people are crazy!”
Tim Grant
Bernardston
~~~~~~~~~~~
A letter appeared in the Greenfield Recorder on June 27, 2026, from Tim Grant of Bernardston. He missed the Big Indian on Route 2 — the fiberglass roadside figure that stood for decades near Shelburne Falls before being removed and shipped to Oklahoma following a campaign organized by Rhonda K. Anderson, Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, and Tomantha Sylvester. He invoked the "woke crowd," the "malcontents," President Trump. Normal people, he said, never had a problem with it.
Tim Grant is wrong about the politics. But he is accidentally right about something more important, and that accidental rightness is worth taking seriously — more seriously than the removal campaign ever took the figure it was removing.
The Big Indian deserved better than Tim Grant's nostalgia. It also deserved better than what it got from the people who sent it to Oklahoma.
Two Figures, Six Miles Apart, Both Imprecise
Six miles west of where the Big Indian stood, in Charlemont, Massachusetts, a bronze Mohawk warrior figure has been standing since 1932. It is called the Hail to the Sunrise. It was commissioned by a local chapter of the Improved Order of Red Men — a fraternal organization that used Native American ceremonial aesthetics as its organizing framework throughout the early twentieth century, during the same period when the Ku Klux Klan was burning crosses on the hillsides above the Deerfield River and floating one downstream on a raft beneath what is now the Bridge of Flowers. The IORM is not the KKK. But the 1920s and 1930s in this valley were not a culturally neutral period in which civic monuments were erected without social context.
The Hail to the Sunrise represents a Mohawk warrior. The Mohawk Trail — Route 2 — is named for the Mohawk people, but the Mohawk were not the primary Indigenous presence in this specific valley. The Pocumtuck people lived here. The Abenaki passed through and fought here. The Nipmuc were part of the treaty fishery at Salmon Crossing. The Mohawk were a presence — sometimes allied, sometimes in conflict — but the road's name is itself a misattribution, a 1914 tourism designation that assigned the most recognizable Northeastern tribal name to a landscape whose Indigenous history is considerably more complex.
So the Hail to the Sunrise is a Mohawk figure on Pocumtuck land, commissioned in 1932 by a fraternal organization, standing on a road incorrectly named for the tribe it represents. It is still standing. The removal campaign did not touch it.
The Big Indian was a generic Plains Indian iconography made by a novice artist in the mid-twentieth century. The artist did not intend to represent a specific tribal nation. He made a figure — a generalized Indigenous elder male, in Plains-influenced dress — as roadside vernacular. It was not a caricature designed to mock. It was not precise. It was not tribally specific. It was imprecise in the way that most American roadside vernacular is imprecise: made by someone who knew what they were reaching toward without knowing the specific history of the specific ground they were standing on.
Both figures are imprecise. Both are on the same road. One was removed. One was not.
"He Doesn't Even Look Like Us"
Tomantha Sylvester, explaining the campaign to remove the Big Indian, said: "He doesn't even look like us."
Tomantha Sylvester is Anishinaabe, from the Great Lakes region. Rhonda Anderson is Iñupiaq-Athabascan, with her enrolled village in Kaktovik, Alaska — approximately three thousand miles from the Connecticut River Valley and the territories of the Pocumtuck, Abenaki, and Nipmuc peoples who actually inhabited this specific landscape.
The Big Indian doesn't look like them. This is correct. It also doesn't look like a Pocumtuck elder, an Abenaki warrior, or a Nipmuc sachem. It doesn't look like any specific person because it wasn't made to represent any specific person. It was made by a novice artist reaching toward a general concept of Indigenous presence on a road associated, however inaccurately, with Indigenous history.
The Hail to the Sunrise Mohawk warrior doesn't look like Tomantha Sylvester or Rhonda Anderson either. It represents a tribe from a different region of the Northeast, commissioned by a fraternal organization, on land that wasn't primarily Mohawk territory. If the standard applied to the Big Indian had been applied consistently, the 1932 bronze should have been the first thing removed.
It was not removed. It stands today on Route 2 in Charlemont, six miles from the empty lot where the Big Indian used to be.
The Empty Lot
The site where the Big Indian stood is now empty.
This is the practical outcome of the removal campaign. A visible Indigenous presence on the Mohawk Trail — however imprecise, however generic, however far from a tribally-endorsed specific representation — is gone. The road named for the Mohawk people now has less visible acknowledgment of Indigenous presence than it did before the campaign. What replaced the figure was nothing. Not a corrected representation. Not a tribally-specific commission. Not a teaching installation. Not a QR code pointing to the actual history of the Pocumtuck people who lived in this valley. Nothing.
Anderson's most consistent public position — documented across years of advocacy and state appointments — is that Native American people are invisibilized in American public culture. Their history is erased. Their presence is suppressed. Their representation is managed out of the public landscape.
She then organized a campaign that produced an empty lot on Route 2 and shipped the Indigenous presence that had stood there for decades to Oklahoma.
The invisibilization she publicly deplores is the documented outcome of the campaign she led. This is not a rhetorical point. It is a description of what is currently visible on Route 2 in Shelburne Falls: nothing, where a figure once stood.
What the Teaching Moment Required
Here is what neither Tim Grant's nostalgia nor the removal campaign offered: the actual argument.
The Big Indian was imprecise. The Hail to the Sunrise is imprecise. Both stand on the same road, which is itself incorrectly named. Between them and the actual history of this valley is approximately six hundred years of Pocumtuck, Abenaki, Nipmuc, and African American presence that the official public landscape of Route 2 has largely managed into the margins.
That is not an argument for removal. It is an argument for reckoning.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in its 2001 statement on Native American imagery, identified the specific harm of sports mascots and institutional symbols as their tendency to "block genuine understanding of contemporary Native people as fellow Americans" — and called for their replacement not with nothing, but with "education about real Indian people, current Native American issues, and the rich variety of American Indian cultures in our country." The Commission's statement identifies dialogue and education as "the roads to understanding." It does not identify an empty lot as a road to understanding. The Commission's statement also addresses a specific context: sports mascots in educational institutions, where students have limited choice about daily exposure and where schools are actively endorsing the imagery as their own institutional identity. The Big Indian was not a school mascot. It was roadside vernacular on a public highway, made by a private artist, on private commercial property. The civil rights framework the Commission developed for institutional contexts does not transfer automatically to a fiberglass figure outside a souvenir shop — and applying it as if it does obscures the genuine distinction between harmful institutional endorsement and imprecise civic representation. What the Big Indian's imprecision called for — on the Commission's own terms — was precisely the education the removal campaign never offered.
A QR code on the Big Indian could have told a visitor: this figure was made by a novice artist in the mid-twentieth century with no tribal specificity intended. The road it stands on is named for the Mohawk people, who were not the primary Indigenous presence in this valley. The people who primarily inhabited this ground were the Pocumtuck. They were present at Peskeompskut — what Europeans called Salmon Falls — for thousands of years before the first European grid was imposed on this landscape. Here is their history. Here is what an honest representation of their presence in this valley might look like. Here is what is proposed.
A QR code on the Hail to the Sunrise could have told a visitor: this figure was commissioned in 1932 by a chapter of the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal organization that adopted Native American ceremonial aesthetics during the same decade the Ku Klux Klan was active in this valley. The figure represents a Mohawk warrior on land that was primarily Pocumtuck and Abenaki territory. The road it stands on was named in 1914 by tourism promoters who chose the most recognizable Northeastern tribal name without reference to the specific Indigenous history of the corridor. Here is that history. Here is what it means that these two imprecise figures are six miles apart on the same imprecisely named road. Here is what precision would require.
That is the teaching moment. It does not require removing anything. It requires adding context, adding honesty, adding the history that both figures reach toward without reaching accurately enough. It requires staying in the room long enough to build something that lasts.
What Pocumtuck State of Mind Proposes Instead
The Hawk sculpture at the Quadrafecta Hub in Charlemont is what precision looks like. Twenty-two feet of Corten steel rising at the position where the Big Indian stood, facing east down the river valley — named for the air totem that surveys the full watershed from above and can see where the corridors are broken and where they connect. The Hawk Trail, the proposed renaming of Route 2 from the 1914 Mohawk Trail misnomer, acknowledges that the road runs through Pocumtuck and Abenaki territory and names it for the ecological character of the landscape rather than for a tribal nation imprecisely assigned to it by tourism promoters.
Approximately a thousand feet from the Hawk, at the Quadrafecta Hub's northeast quadrant, Chief Greylock — Wawanotewat — rises in Corten steel from a Cultural Burial Mound, facing west toward the mountain that carries a version of his name. He is Abenaki. He actually fought in this valley. His story is actually unfinished in this landscape. His presence here is not imprecise. It is historically specific, tribally accurate, and placed in the ground he defended.
In the southwest quadrant, Mashalisk — placed on the correct side of the river, correctly oriented — represents the Pocumtuck matriarchal lineage of diplomacy and governance. She is the people who were here. She is not generic. She is specific to this valley, to this river, to this treaty fishery that sustained civilizations for thousands of years before the first dam went in.
Six miles east, at Salmon Crossing in Shelburne Falls, the Sachem Salmon rises twenty-five feet from the heart site at Peskeompskut — the ancient treaty fishery — welded from reclaimed Lamson & Goodnow cutlery steel. The factory whose operations contributed to silencing the river becomes the material from which the river's primary ecological and cultural agent returns.
These are not generic figures. They are not imprecise. They are not removed and shipped to Oklahoma. They are placed in the specific ground they represent, in materials drawn from the specific cultural history of that ground, facing the specific directions their stories require.
This is what the Big Indian was pointing toward without the knowledge to get there. Tim Grant was right that the figure meant something to people who stopped on Route 2 and looked up at it. He was wrong that the meaning it carried was sufficient. The removal campaign was right that the figure was imprecise. It was wrong that removal was the answer.
The teaching moment is still available. The ground is still here. The history is still waiting.
The Hawk takes up its position. The warrior's figure rises. The salmon returns.
The empty lot on Route 2 is not the end of the argument. It is the opening.
Full documentation of the Pocumtuck State of Mind proposal, including the Quadrafecta Hub design program, the Hail to the Sunrise Teaching Node, and the complete 119-node network, is available at johnsendelbach.com. No login. No fee.
John F. Sendelbach is a metalworker and public artist with thirty years of permanent public installations across western Massachusetts. He is the originator of the TransLocalism practice and the designer of Pocumtuck State of Mind.
© 2026 John F. Sendelbach. All rights reserved.