ON RECORD: A DOCUMENTED SAFETY STATEMENT AND WHISTLEBLOWER FRAMEWORK ANALYSIS
John F. Sendelbach
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts
May 2026
Published to the public record at johnsendelbach.com
Available to all journalists, attorneys, civil rights investigators, and courts without restriction.
PREFATORY NOTE
This document serves two functions simultaneously. The first is analytical: it maps six years of documented experience against the established historical and psychological framework of whistleblower retaliation, drawing on peer-reviewed research and verified historical precedent. The second is evidentiary: it places on the public record, in specific and verifiable terms, a statement of documented fear — fear that is rational, evidence-based, and proportional to a six-year record of escalating institutional harm that has already produced one violent assault, the destruction of evidence, and the documented physical deterioration of the author's cardiovascular system.
Above video shows the attacks they inverted in their lies.
On the Unsupported Accusation of Antisemitism, the Evidence That Refutes It, and the Institutional Silence That Followed
By John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026
There is a polished stone bench on the hill above Buckland, in the cemetery that looks out over the Deerfield River valley. I made it. A local Jewish woman named Susan Garfield Wright had commissioned stone sculptures from me when I first arrived in this area, pieces for her husband Michael that stayed in the home they shared throughout her life. After Susan died, her husband and daughters came to me with an intimate request: would I move large stones from their property to the cemetery on the hill, and polish one into a bench in her memory? They wanted it designed to receive a bronze plaque that would tell her story. A permanent marker, in the place where she rested. I did it. The bench is there. Anyone can go see it.
The acquisition of the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract marks the first official, paid accession of the Mohawk Repair Institute. Purchased from an online antiquarian picker who recovered the document from an anonymous estate clearing in Maine, this deed is far more than a fragment of local ephemera. It provides a contractual snapshot of a town systematically re-engineered in the mid-19th century—a landscape where the same elite hands that dammed the river, channeled municipal capital, and constructed new civic spaces also signed off on the physical relocation of the dead.
Exhibition Overview: “The Four Blocked Flows” is an archival and topographical exhibition that uses the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract as a lens to analyze the systematic interruption of four interwoven systems of circulation in Shelburne Falls during the mid-19th century: biological (salmon), hydrological (streams), social (labor and capital), and memorial (the dead). The Mohawk Repair Institute presents this material not as antique nostalgia but as the evidentiary basis for design-driven interventions aimed at daylighting buried streams, re-marking forgotten graves, and restoring the town’s open circulation between past and present.
The fish once came up the Deerfield in numbers that mattered to the people who lived along it. In 1735 a treaty was signed at those falls that recognized fishing rights and set a zone of peace—no warring within a day’s walk of the waterfalls. It was already a narrow agreement in a river system that had been taken in every other practical way. The treaty sits in the archives now, one more document made after the main decisions had already been settled on the ground.
By the end of the nineteenth century the falls had been dammed and the valley turned into a working corridor of mills and rail. The Shelburne Falls & Colrain Street Railway laid a concrete bridge across the river in 1908. The cars ran for a couple of decades under the usual Northern rules about who rode where. When the line died, the bridge sat empty until the local women’s club decided to cover it with flowers in 1929. They planted four hundred varieties where the tracks had been and called the result timeless beauty. The brochures did not mention the fishing grounds that had been drowned or the people who had used the falls before the dams.
Diogenes of Sinope walked through the streets of Athens in broad daylight carrying a lit lantern, claiming he was searching for a single honest person. When Alexander the Great stood before him and offered any favor, Diogenes gave a simple reply: step aside, you're blocking my sunlight.
The image endures because it captures something stubborn — the refusal to adjust one's understanding of reality simply because the surrounding environment demands it.
There is a window on the second floor of a building in Shelburne Falls where a light has been burning continuously for six years. It does not turn off at night. It does not turn off during the day. Through winter darkness and summer sun, it remains constant.
To a passerby, it might look like an oversight. It is not.
The Plastic Pavilion and the Village-Wide Erosion of Design Standards
There is a precise moment in the decay of civic standards when a town stops seeing a scarred landscape as temporary and begins treating it as normal. It occurs when an administrative body looks at a degraded piece of public landscape, shrugs its shoulders, and decides that a permanent eyesore is an acceptable price to pay for raw convenience.
THE biological foundation of the Mohawk Repair Institute, and why it started with seven tires.
When I took over this building, there were seven automotive tires sitting on the property, left behind by the previous occupant, headed nowhere in particular. I repurposed them as planters. It seemed right: take what was left, put it to use, grow something that belongs here.
That is, in miniature, what the Mohawk Repair Institute does.
Most people who find MRI find it through the archive concept, or the sculptural work, or the name itself, which was already on the building when I arrived, and which I am keeping deliberately, as a teaching instrument rather than an erasure. But the nursery is the part you can hold in your hands. Seven Tire Natives is where the ecological argument becomes physical.
"The name was already on the building. We took it seriously."
Andrew Baker has spent more than two decades accumulating overlapping civic roles in Shelburne Falls—arts, economic development, housing, sewer, school committee, and finally the Selectboard—cultivating the profile of a dedicated community servant while developing a precise institutional reflex for deflecting accountability downward and away from himself. As a Selectboard member, Baker holds direct oversight authority over the Shelburne Police Department. That authority obligates him to respond when constituents bring documented evidence of civil rights violations, selective enforcement, and officer misconduct.
The documented record shows he has not done so once. Not for a single complaint. Not in six years.
Instead, the record captures Baker using his official municipal email to accuse a constituent of criminal trespass without evidence, then being forced to issue a rapid retraction once it was proved no warning signs existed. It catches him executing physical and administrative retreats at the local post office, using shifting internal titles ("neither the Select Board chair nor the Police liaison") to insulate himself, and routing systemic police complaints back to the exact police chief under investigation. Baker is a long-tenured insider who has learned to navigate every complaint without ever engaging its substance, making institutional evasion the defining feature of his public service.
HERE’S A PIECE THEY’LL NEVER PUBLISH. THEY’D RATHER RUN FLUFF PIECES FOR INCOMPETENT “LEADERS” TO SAVE FACE THAN ADMIT THEY WERE WRONG. IT’S INSTITUTIONAL INERTIA AT ITS WORST — POLLUTING THE VERY DEMOCRACY THEY CONSTANTLY CLAIM TO BE SAVING.
Submitted with My Turn: "The Soil, the Silence, and Six Years"
To: Dan Crowley, Editor, Greenfield Recorder
From: John F. Sendelbach, Shelburne FallsDate: May 2026
NOTE: This document evolves as field investigation continues. Current version: May 2026.
OVERVIEW
Core Project Vision: Restore baseflow to historic Mechanic Street Brook. Primary location: Ghost Hollow, a steep-sided, ten-foot-deep former stream channel behind the historic barn at the town-owned 49 Mechanic Street parcel. Three main technical interventions: install a Dutch-Door Weir (self-regulating passive flow-control structure) at the existing diversion; decommission and physically remove the 1961 Rat Tunnel (the diagonal 3-by-4-foot box culvert that is the root cause of sixty years of flooding); and daylight the brook through the restored Otter Way corridor on the town parcel.
Expected Results: Natural meandering channel with pools, riffles, and bioengineered banks. Primary construction material: approximately 200 tons of local glacial stone sourced from Beaver Picchu™ property less than a mile away. New public greenway and watershed learning corridor connecting Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School to the Deerfield River waterfront. Elimination of stagnant mosquito-breeding ditch, replaced by continuously moving water and a functional natural predatory ecosystem. First accurate stormwater map of the Mechanic Street corridor — solving a documented DPW infrastructure crisis that recently produced a drilling incident when a contractor struck an unmapped concrete pipe on Bridge Street.
The Geographic Loop: The restored brook physically reopens the historic water corridor that once connected the Arms Cemetery — now the Beaver Picchu™ upper watershed — to the Pratt Memorial (Arms) Library, whose foundation sits within twenty feet of where the brook once cascaded to the Deerfield River below Salmon Falls. One block south of that cascade point, at the corner of Bridge Street and Deerfield Avenue, is the Pocumtuck State Park heart site at Salmon Crossing, where the Sachem Salmon sculpture and the Sixty Square Sphere will be installed above the glacial potholes where Shelly still waits. The brook restoration and the PSP heart site are not adjacent proposals. They are one connected argument, written in the landscape by two centuries of erasure and now being corrected in the same generation.
Immediate Municipal Actions Required:
Direct DPW and Conservation Commission to cease and remediate illegal brush/leaf dumping in Ghost Hollow
Authorize Water Department and DPW to release all available drainage records
Retain the 49 Mechanic Street parcel permanently in public ownership
Approve submission of the MassDEP Ecological Restoration Pre-Design Grant
Key Partners: Shelburne Conservation Commission · Shelburne Water Department · Shelburne DPW · Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School · Connecticut River Watershed Council · Mass Audubon · Franklin Land Trust · UMass Amherst LARP Department · Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association
The Culinary Institute of America ~ Hyde Park, New York
A Culinary Sculpture Series for the Hudson River Watershed Proposal ~ May 2026
John F. Sendelbach Sculptor & Landscape Designer. Shelburne Falls, MA
The Idea in Plain TermsOne sculpture already lives on the CIA campus: a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon made entirely from salvaged culinary cutlery. “Old Diamondsides” stands near the entrance plaza, overlooking the Hudson River that once teemed with its living namesakes. It was installed in 2015 as the first node of a larger idea. The Fish Tour completes that idea. Eight site-specific sculptures, each fabricated primarily from recycled stainless steel kitchen tools and equipment, trace a deliberate pedestrian route across the Hyde Park campus. Each piece represents a signature species of the Hudson River estuary — ecologically, historically, and culinarily significant. Interpretive signage at every stop weaves together river science, watershed restoration, culinary tradition, and the deeper interdependence of healthy waters and healthy kitchens. The tour begins at the academic core and descends toward the riverside, turning underutilized spaces into moments of surprise, recognition, reflection, and quiet delight.It is a walking conversation between the kitchen and the river.
The 7 AM Knock: A Ledger of Silence and Revelation
Thinking about Omi’s life on the day of her birth got me reflecting on the rest of the bloodline. If Omi’s deafness created the "inherited acoustics" of our house—the need to project and launch words across weather—then my father’s silence created the deeper infrastructure of our history. By the fall before COVID hit, the family rhythm had shifted to a hospice rotation. My brother, my sister, and I—the three of us left after losing our brother Alan—took turns traveling from Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to sit vigil in Lancaster, New York. My parents were in their final landing place: a modest apartment at Greenfields. Three weeks prior, during our last real conversation, my mother had drifted into a hallucination, calling me Jeff, my childhood best friend. My father and I didn’t correct her; we just shared a quiet glance of acceptance, watching the blurred lines of a long life softening at the edges. When I arrived that final Friday, she was unconscious in the medical wing—just hours from death. Everyone knows you don’t knock on a door at seven in the morning unless the world has shifted. I was kneeling on the white carpet of that small living room, surrounded by the vintage transit schedules and victorian papers I had brought to photograph for my eBay shop, trying to keep my hands busy while my heart waited. When the knock finally came, my father and I shared a look of absolute knowing. I opened the door to a Black nurse who had come to tell us that Nancy Ann (Sahs) Sendelbach born in 1929, was gone. Later that afternoon, in the strange hollow quiet that follows a death, I drew one final entry out of my father’s internal ledger. I brought up the derogatory language I had pushed back against in my teens. At 94, he finally explained the root of it. He told me about the late 1930s in Buffalo—walking to technical high school through neighborhoods carved up by redlining, where he and his friends were regularly chased and harassed by Black kids. That unspoken trauma became the silent engine behind the “white flight” that carried my parents to the rural safety of Orchard Park in the 1960s. The irony is layered and thick. They had moved us onto land founded in the early 1800s by Quakers like David Eddy (who arrived from Vermont in 1804 and claimed hundreds of acres around what became the Four Corners) and Obadiah Baker (who settled in 1807 and opened his home for the first sanctioned Quaker meetings). This was ground soaked in reformist ideals: a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Quaker families helped fugitives heading north to Canada. The Baker homestead on East Quaker Road still carries that marker today. Yet that same Quaker “plainness” and moral clarity rested on prior displacement. The Haudenosaunee—particularly the Seneca Nation—had long stewarded this territory. By the 1820s–1830s, through treaties, pressure, and the gradual sale of the Buffalo Creek Reservation, the Seneca presence was largely removed from the immediate area, even as Quaker settlers built meeting houses, aided escaped slaves, and championed the oppressed. We grew up running through fields and playing in Smokes Creek, a landscape shaped by both the Friends’ quiet testimony and the later hand-crafted integrity of Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft movement nearby. We were products of a retreat from urban friction, raised in a cradle built on layered displacements. Sitting there at 94, my father didn’t need to be forced into reconciliation—he was ready. I coaxed the story out, and he spoke clearly: he had no problem with Black people. He had reached a place of transcendence, cared for in his final years by a diverse staff at Greenfields and delivered the hardest news of his life by a Black woman. He didn’t die carrying the secret or the old fear. When he handed me my mother’s gold wedding band that afternoon, the inherited acoustics of our house finally harmonized. The fields of Orchard Park are mostly cookie-cutter subdivisions now. But on that white carpet in Lancaster, a much older and more complicated landscape was finally cleared.
