In the June 6, 2020 Facebook thread beneath Alouette Batteau's viral post about the Iron Bridge — 22,000 views, 436 comments — Rhonda K. Anderson published the following assessment of John Sendelbach:
"I have known 'Johnny Bach' for about 14 years now. He is a little unhinged, so his ideology is wacked to start with. There is little reasoning with him — he is a conspiracy theorist type."
She later added, in a separate comment, that active restraining orders existed against him for harassing women, including herself.
Both claims are false. The fourteen-year characterization maps a 2020 political script onto a dormant professional interaction from 2011 — a declined business partnership, followed by nine years of documented silence. The restraining order claim was published, survived twelve minutes, was edited to add the phrase "from first-hand 1:1 experience" for authority, then revised the following morning from "there are restraining orders" to "there were efforts towards restraining orders," and immediately wrapped in the language of personal vulnerability: "Tagging me in isn't making me feel very safe."
Certified review of Franklin County Superior Court and Greenfield District Court records confirms: no restraining orders, active or historical, existed against Sendelbach in connection with Anderson or any other party at the time of publication.
She told 22,000 people otherwise.
And then, at the bottom of the thread, she added one more comment.
"I wasn't actually even there."
This is the sentence that organizes everything else.
The Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs — gubernatorial appointee, Massachusetts Cultural Council board member, 2021 Commonwealth Heroine — characterized a private citizen's character, fabricated his legal history, and amplified both to 22,000 people, about an event she did not witness, sourcing her characterization from a business interaction nine years prior that had nothing to do with any of the political content she attributed to it.
The people calling for zero nuance extended to Sendelbach's words that morning were, in significant number, also not there. Katie Hennessey stated her goal in the thread plainly: move him away from the scene so the protest could continue. Mission accomplished, she said. Anderson praised her for it. Sonseniora Walters called it hopeful. Sarah Chase said she would have started a chant.
Zero nuance. No charitable reading. No interest in context. No acknowledgment that the characterization being amplified came from someone who, by her own admission, was not present for the event being characterized.
This is the standard Anderson applies outward. It is worth examining what standard she applies inward.
In December 2011, Anderson published a letter in the Brattleboro Reformer about a basket of fluorescent feather headdresses she found displayed at a local shop during the Holly Days celebration. The letter was precise about what she found offensive and why:
"It is not okay to dress up as another race... Stereotyping and caricatures of Natives do nothing to represent the more than 560 distinct cultures in the U.S. and more than 630 in Canada who are thriving, who dress in mainstream clothing, and who do not wear traditional clothing every day."
In September 2017, she posted the following to her public Facebook page:
"If anybody dresses as a Native American for Halloween I'm going to mace you and give you the full Experience."
Seventy reactions. Five shares. No apparent consequence.
Three years before the mace post — and three years after the Brattleboro Reformer letter — in March 2014, Sonseniora Walters posted photographs of herself and a companion to social media. Walters is an active participant in Anderson's civic network and a vocal member of the June 2020 campaign against Sendelbach. The photographs show her in a feather headband, face paint, and fringed dress — precisely the category of representation Anderson's published letter described as racist, and that her 2017 post threatened to punish with chemical spray.
The photographs are dated and exist in the social media record.
Anderson did not post about them. Her network did not flag them. No correction appeared.
In Shelburne Falls, on a public sidewalk, Walters installed a painted Little Free Library designated the "LITTLE BIPOC LIBRARY." The text on its panel reads: "Black Indigenous People & Color Authors Exclusively." The installation excludes books by white authors by explicit written policy, on a public sidewalk, in a village whose literary and civic tradition it is claiming to serve.
Anderson did not post about that either.
In May 2015, Anderson shared a memorial post for her cousin, Etok Charles Edwardsen Jr., an Iñupiaq activist and a genuine figure in the Alaska Native land rights movement. The post quoted him from a 1970 speech in Washington DC. In that speech, he said: "The United States got gypped when it bought Alaska."
The word is Romani in origin. It encodes the same mechanism of ethnic caricature — a people reduced to a stereotype of dishonest dealing — that Anderson has spent years of public advocacy arguing causes measurable harm to Indigenous youth.
She shared the post approvingly. She was mourning her cousin. No correction was posted. No one in her network flagged it.
The standard, again, moved in one direction.
Anderson holds five acres in East Colrain, Massachusetts. The framework she deploys publicly — the framework that sent the Big Indian to Oklahoma and left an empty lot on Route 2 — has a logical terminus. It does not stop at fiberglass. It stops at the deed. She holds a deed.
The asymmetry is not limited to Anderson's network. In Shelburne Falls, Floodwater Brewing Co. posted a cake to Instagram whose imagery — dark frosting, exaggerated pink lips, googly eyes — carried an iconographic history that is not ambiguous to anyone familiar with the documentary record of American racist caricature. The post generated 35 likes and a comment calling it fabulous. Floodwater is Zach Livingston's business — the same Zach Livingston whose sworn statement anchors the probable cause chain in Commonwealth v. Hennessey and Commonwealth v. Batteau, currently before Judge Mazanec. His mother, Joan Livingston, edits the Greenfield Recorder.
When the post was flagged, an apology followed. It received more than 100 likes — more engagement than the original. The controversy was its own reward.
The Recorder ran no article. The community thread with 436 comments did not materialize. The accountability infrastructure that produced 22,000 views on the Iron Bridge post was not activated.
The Padded Shovel does not apply uniformly. It applies directionally.
There is a final document worth placing in the record. A photograph from September 2019 shows Anderson at the Colrain water rally she organized following the Barnhardt Corporation acid spill that killed thousands of fish in the North River. She told the Valley Post that day: water has memory. Water is a living being. Water is sacred. Standing beside her in that photograph is Catherine Hennessey — a defendant in active criminal proceedings before Judge Mazanec in Greenfield District Court, charged in connection with an assault at Floodwater Brewery on November 30, 2025, in which the victim's iPhone was disposed of into the Deerfield River. The river Anderson consecrated as sacred at a public rally. The standard, one final time, moved in one direction.
What the record shows, cumulatively, is not a commissioner applying a consistent standard of cultural accountability to a landscape she has been appointed to steward. It shows a standard that moves outward — toward a fiberglass figure on a commercial property, toward a metalworker on a bridge she was not standing on — and does not move inward, toward the costume in the network's own archive, toward the discriminatory sign on the public sidewalk book box, toward the slur on the memorial post, toward the deed in East Colrain, toward the cake on the brewery Instagram whose apology generated more likes than the original post and whose editor-mother's newspaper found nothing worth covering, toward the river that received a phone on November 30, 2025.
The eyeroll Tim Grant's letter produced across this community is not nostalgia for a fiberglass figure. It is the accumulated recognition of that asymmetry, expressed in the only register available to people who have watched it operate for years without a forum adequate to name it.
Part 1 of this essay asked what the Big Indian deserved that it didn't get: context, precision, the actual history of the ground it stood on.
The same question applies here. The standard Anderson demands of others is the standard this record applies to her. Not with malice. With the same forensic patience she did not extend to the man on the bridge she was not there to observe.
The ground is still here. The history is still waiting. The empty lot on Route 2 is not the end of the argument.
It is, as it was yesterday, the opening.
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. Full documentation is available at johnsendelbach.com. No login. No fee.