Missing the Big Indian?

MY TURN: The Erasure That Calls Itself Preservation

About a week ago a man came into my shop. Around eighty years old, from Colrain, just north of here. Lifelong local. When I described the full situation surrounding the removal of the Big Indian — the petitions, the process, who drove it and from where — his eyes welled up.

That is the data point nobody submitted.

The Big Indian stood on Route 2 for nearly fifty years. It was not fine art. It was not an accurate representation of Pocumtuck or Abenaki culture. It was a mid-twentieth century roadside figure — vernacular, imperfect, and genuinely loved by the communities that grew up passing it. When it was removed in August 2023 following a sustained advocacy campaign, it was trucked to Vinita, Oklahoma, where it now stands outside a Route 66 café. Not preserved locally. Not replaced with something more accurate. Sent away. The Mohawk Trail now has a blank base where a conversation used to start.

I want to talk about evidence, because the removal was justified primarily on the grounds of documented harm to Native American youth. This is a serious claim and it deserves serious scrutiny.

There is a body of peer-reviewed research on the psychological effects of Native American mascots on Native youth. It is real and I am not dismissing it. The primary studies — conducted by researcher Stephanie Fryberg and colleagues — reported measurable negative psychological effects following exposure to Native mascot imagery. The effects were statistically detectable. They were also, by the researchers' own data, practically small. More notably, a substantial majority of Native youth in these studies reported positive or neutral associations with the imagery, yet the researchers concluded harm existed at the aggregate level regardless.

The more significant methodological question concerns context. All of this research was conducted on school mascots — team names and logos that Native students encounter daily as enrolled members of an educational institution with repeated, inescapable exposure. The Big Indian was a roadside tourist landmark encountered variably by travelers and locals. Whether findings from one setting transfer to the other is a genuine question of external validity that the removal advocates did not publicly address. That gap matters when permanent decisions about community landmarks are being made.

But the evidentiary problem is only part of what needs to be named here.

The stated mission of the campaign was to combat the invisibilization of Indigenous culture — to make Native history and presence visible and respected rather than erased. I take that mission seriously. I have spent thirty-five years making public art in this community rooted in the actual ecological and Indigenous history of this valley. I know what erasure looks like.

What I am watching is erasure calling itself preservation.

The Big Indian was imperfect. It was also, every day, a physical prompt to every person driving Route 2 that this is Indigenous land, that this road follows a trail with a name and a history and a people behind it. Remove it — and replace it with what? Visitors are no longer nudged to ask why this road has that name, who lived here, or what history unfolded along this valley. Removing a symbol without replacing it with something historically stronger does not increase public understanding of Indigenous culture. It leaves silence.

Among the principal advocates for the removal was the Western Massachusetts Commissioner of Indian Affairs, an Iñupiaq-Athabascan whose enrolled village is in Kaktovik, Alaska — not Pocumtuck, not Abenaki, not from the specific ancestral territory this trail crosses. The concentration of advocacy authority over a community's physical landmarks — without a public vote, without documented consultation with longtime residents, on the basis of research whose application to this specific context was never examined — raises legitimate questions about democratic process regardless of the underlying intentions.

After the removal I proposed replacing the Big Indian with Chief Greylock — the documented Abenaki war chief whose resistance defined this valley, whose presence would have told the actual story the Big Indian never could. The proposal was declined. The teepee is still there. The Indigenous merchandise is still there. What was rejected was not Indigenous presence but another conversation about what stands outside the door. That experience became the foundation for the Pocumtuck State of Mind — my broader framework for authentic Indigenous interpretation along this corridor, detailed at johnsendelbach.com.

The man from Colrain almost cried. The base is empty. We were told this would make Indigenous history more visible. That is not preservation. That is erasure calling itself preservation.

John F. Sendelbach is a sculptor, public artist, and longtime resident of Shelburne Falls.

On Cheap Morality and the People Who Practice It

"I never trust anyone who puts a sign in front of their house"

Someone said it to me years ago, casually, the way people say true things when they're not trying to be profound. I never trust anyone who puts a sign in front of their house. I've been thinking about that sentence for six years. Not because signs are evil. Not because the causes they advertise are wrong. But because a sign in front of a house is a social transaction, not a moral one. It says: I want you to know which side I'm on. It does not say: I am willing to pay a cost for it. There is a distinction I have been living inside for six years that I want to name clearly before I show you what it looks like from the inside.

Cheap morality produces social reward without cost. Signs. Social media posts. Solidarity slogans. Symbolic walks through the village. Letters to the paper about pharmacies and nurses. The currency of cheap morality is belonging — the comfort of being seen on the right side of a moment in a community where everyone reads the same paper and attends the same events and knows, at every gathering, who is in and who is out.

Expensive morality requires something else entirely. Reading the evidence. Interviewing both sides. Correcting a public mistake you helped spread. Risking your own social standing to oppose someone you know. Putting your name on a petition that names a specific wrong rather than attending a walk that names a general feeling.

The sign is the cheapest possible unit of cheap morality. It costs the price of the plastic it's printed on, which is itself ironic, and I will get to that. What I want to show you is what cheap morality does to the person who ends up on the wrong side of it. Not in theory. In a documented, six-year record, in a small Massachusetts village, with names and docket numbers and court findings and a phone at the bottom of the Deerfield River.

UPDATED: "Eyeroll" Rhonda, The Big Indian, Hail to the Sunrise, and the Standard That Moves in One Direction

Condescension face: Rhonda Anderson,
Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs,
mention her name, and the eyes roll....because Rhonda knows best! 

I. The Letter That Started It

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.

Before explaining why, there is something that needs to be named plainly — something that has not been said plainly enough anywhere yet. It is the thing that connects a fiberglass figure on Route 2 to a Facebook thread with 22,000 views to a light left on in an apartment for six years. It is the dirty trick.

Drummers "boys" attempt to "Save Democracy" ROFL

What the Phrase Looks Like From the Inside of a Six-Year Case

John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · 2026

---

On the evening of November 22, 2025, a public art installation projected images onto the buildings of downtown Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. One of the slides read: Save Democracy.

That same evening, Katherine Hennessey attended the event wearing a large paper-mâché frog mask. She wore it, as she later explained in a sworn court document, because she suspected I would be there and did not want me to recognize her. She positioned herself six feet in front of me for fourteen continuous minutes while I spoke publicly at the event. She called the police on me for standing on a public sidewalk. An officer tracked me to private property to deliver a harassment caution for conduct that a sitting judge subsequently confirmed, on the record, was constitutionally protected First Amendment activity.

Eight days later, she and her husband physically assaulted me on a public sidewalk. More than thirty blows. My recording phone seized and thrown into the Deerfield River. A cardiac emergency. Two criminal arraignments. Active criminal proceedings are pending as of this writing.

The "Save Democracy" slide was still on the buildings when she called the police on me for standing on a sidewalk.

Documented Record of Selective Coverage by the Greenfield Recorder & Daily Hampshire Gazette

Poor Joan! Had years to correct the record, finally her son had to do it in court testimony

There is a test for institutional bias that does not require intent. It requires only a consistent pattern of what gets covered and what does not, applied over time to the same subjects. By that test, the Greenfield Recorder and the Daily Hampshire Gazette — both owned by Newspapers of New England, based in Concord, New Hampshire — have a documented pattern of selective coverage involving the Shelburne Police Department, the people who assaulted me on November 30, 2025, and the federal civil rights case that validates the most serious institutional complaint I have been making for six years.

What follows is not an accusation of malice. It is a record of what was covered, what was not, when I notified these publications directly, and what the pattern looks like when placed in a single document. The record includes the Editor-in-Chief's own words, published in her own column, in the same edition as the first front-page article about me — words that define a standard her paper has not applied to its coverage of my case.

I am not antisemitic. I am anti-semantic.

I oppose the way the accusation of "antisemitism" is deployed as a semantic weapon — a preemptive label that substitutes for evidence, shuts down examination, and protects specific individuals from accountability. Once the word is spoken, the actual record often becomes irrelevant. The label does the work. The inquiry stops.

This is not a theoretical complaint. It happened to me.

Sorensen & Hoberman
Semantic bigots

NIGGERLIPS: What They Called Me First

Before anyone called me a Grand Wizard, they called me

NIGGERLIPS.

I was a kid in a suburb of Buffalo, New York, in a neighborhood where nobody escaped ridicule. Everyone had a nickname. The gauntlet was universal and merciless — that was the culture of the place, and in some ways it was democratic. But the slurs that stick are the ones attached to things you cannot change. Buck teeth. A pronounced overbite. Lips that were larger than the suburban norm and accentuated by the dental situation. These were the features I was born with, inherited from whatever confluence of German immigrant genetics produced my family in western New York.

Niggerlips. The word arrived early and lodged itself permanently — not because I accepted what it implied about me, but because it taught me something specific about how contempt works. The slur didn't require the target to be Black. It required only a physical feature that could be associated with Blackness and then weaponized. The cruelty was not about race in any coherent sense. It was about designation — the assignment of a category to a person based on something they could not control, followed by the social enforcement of that category through repetition.

An Open Letter to Rev. Kate Stevens, the Leadership of Trinity Church, and the Institutional Leaders Who Have Said Nothing

To Rev. Kate Stevens:

You wrote in the Greenfield Recorder on June 20, 2020: "We need to listen; we need to learn the real United States history and hear all the stories that have not been told."

I am writing to offer you the opportunity to do exactly that.

John & Kate: not a fucking peep from them about
their friends destroying my reputation and career with lies.

You know me. You officiated the wedding of Julie and Dave — people I care about. We have been in the same rooms, at the same tables, in this valley. You know the kind of person I am, or you did.

Training Day in Greenfield: Public Performance vs. Private Practice June 12, 2026

On the same day I was measuring tire lines and documenting what appears to be another stay-away order violation by Brook Batteau, the Northwestern District Attorney's Office was hosting a training at Greenfield Community College titled "

Learning ‘the individual red flags’: DA’s office holds training for law enforcement, EMS personnel"

The Recorder ran a glowing piece. Deputy Commissioner Daniel Batiste lectured on strangulation, intimate partner violence, and human trafficking. EMS and law enforcement were urged to take victims seriously, recognize subtle signs, avoid minimization, and provide wrap-around support. They talked about icebergs, raspy voices mistaken for asthma, coercion on 911 calls, and the need to hold offenders accountable.

It sounded excellent on paper. Progressive. Trauma-informed. Evidence-based.

And it landed like a lead balloon against the six-year reality of my own case sitting in their docket.

Richard Wright's Black Boy: Symbolic Conversion and the Automatic Category

Symbolic Conversion and the Automatic Category: A Theoretical Integration

I. The Problem of the Framework That Forgets Its Own Origins

Richard Wright's Black Boy is not primarily a book about racism. It is a book about perception — specifically about what happens when a society develops a framework for seeing a group of people so complete and so automatic that it stops being able to see the individuals within that group.

Relational Aggression, Symbolic Conversion, and Institutional Adoption: A Six-Year Case Study of Reputational Stigmatization in a Small Community

Relational aggression — harm inflicted through damage to reputation, relationships, and social standing rather than direct physical confrontation — can escalate from interpersonal conflict into sustained institutional destruction when initial designations achieve broad social and institutional adoption. While research on misogyny is extensive and well-institutionalized, parallel processes involving hostility toward men as a category remain significantly under-theorized and under-measured, particularly in their indirect, relational, and institutional forms. This review synthesizes conceptual foundations from relational aggression theory, status degradation ceremonies, network transmission models, and moral licensing. It identifies critical gaps in the literature: limited longitudinal multi-source case studies, inadequate measurement tools for targeted and institutional hostility, and insufficient analysis of how false or exaggerated accusations become embedded in police, media, and civic institutions. A richly documented six-year community conflict in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts serves as a high-resolution forensic case study mapping the full trajectory from social designation through network amplification to institutional adoption, resulting in documented physiological, economic, and social harm.

Another Anonymous Complaint, Another Non-Event: The Building Inspector Stopped By

Two days ago I finally fired up the circular saw and started putting the final sheeting on the walls in the new office at the shop. It was the first real noise I've made out here — nothing crazy, just normal construction sounds while I button up the space for Mohawk Repair Institute and the native plant nursery.

Apparently that was enough to trigger a complaint. Or complaints — plural. The inspector told me "they" called it in but wouldn't give names. Classic.

The Designation Machine

Here is one of the obese hags, self proclaimed "proud antifa member", seemingly grooming children at a sexually oriented "parade".

According to the documented archive, I have been called:

Grand Wizard. Nazi. KKK member. Racist. Racist bigot. Transphobic. Anti-LGBTQ. Sexist. Woman hater. Unhinged. Toxic. Conspiracy theorist. Stalker. Harasser. Dangerous. Disruptor. Menace to the community. Asshat. Heartless bag of flesh. Fragile masculinity. Hateful.

These dehumanizing designations were applied by approximately 210 documented commenters across three platforms over three days in June 2020.  They were never corrected by a single official from any institution invloved in my demolition. The cops, the select boards, the DA, the 4 judges i was forced to appear before...not a single person has given ONE SINGLE FUCK about my life.

The Pride Expansion: From Private Right to Public Institution

SEXUALIZED CHILD GROOMING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Adults possess an absolute right to live their private lives, define their relationships, and express their identities in whatever consenting manner they choose. That is not the subject of this argument.

The subject of this argument is the public spectacle that has emerged to replace the private right.
The conclusion is simple: Normalcy does not require a parade. It does not require a month-long calendar of state-sanctioned celebrations, it does not require the endorsement of multinational corporations, and it certainly does not require the participation of children as an audience or a prop.

6th anniversary of psychopathic harrassment: Bonfire of the Vanities: Shelburne Falls Edition

HOW THE GREENFIELD RECORDER ACCIDENTALLY PUBLISHED EXHIBIT A IN A FIVE-YEAR PERJURY BONFIRE 😡

The irony cuts like a cold chisel through wet clay. You flip open the Greenfield Recorder on March 2, 2026, and the headline lands like a punchline nobody asked for: “It’s art and community.”
Above the fold, full color, the photo dominates: Kate Hennessey—arms wide, face lit by bonfire glow—standing beside Brook Batteau in the heart of the Art Garden’s 10th annual Winter HooPla. Reed Sparrow’s crows dangle overhead with their painted pleas to “resist” and “keep loving.” A kraken of light attacks a glowing ship. Butterfly puppets flutter. The railyard in Shelburne Falls transformed into a winter wonderland, vacant of people oohing and aahing, volunteers serving hot chocolate, positive notes projected on studio walls, love declared stronger than hate. And there she is, quoted dead center: “Every year the HooPla gets a little bigger and a little brighter,” says Hennessey, “the keeper of the flame.”🔥

Seventy-four days earlier—December 1, 2025—she sat in a lawyer’s office or at her kitchen table and swore under oath in a Harassment Prevention Order affidavit that my presence in Shelburne Falls had made public life intolerable. She claimed terror so profound she wore a giant papier-mâché frog mask to a November 22 public art event because she “suspected Mr. Sendelbach might show up … and didn’t want him to recognize me.” She described running from me, stopping only to avoid being alone with me, dialing police because I was “unhinged.” She said seeing my car in a parking lot made her “choose to drive away rather than interact.” The town, in her sworn words, had become a place she could barely navigate.🐸