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.

