A fiberglass roadside figure left Charlemont for Oklahoma. The historical question it exposed remains in western Massachusetts.
A record of public claims and acquaintance
On June 6, 2020, an edited video of me on the Bridge of Flowers was shared in a Facebook post that eventually drew 300+ comments and about 22,000 views. Rhonda Anderson, who was then serving as Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, commented in it. She described having known me for about fourteen years; called me "a little unhinged" and "a conspiracy theorist type"; said she had had "this talk" with me many times over the years; said we had agreed to disagree; and described herself as a kind, thoughtful, supportive friend who had listened often.
She was not present at the Bridge of Flowers event shown in the video. In a reply to Jasper Forest, she wrote: "I wasn't actually even there."
I record that distinction because presence at the event, the scale of the claimed personal relationship, and the legal claims made later in the thread all affect how a reader weighs the authority of her public description.
My own record of the acquaintance is narrower. I met Anderson about five or six times. Around 2010, a remark I made to her husband was understood in a way I did not intend, and I came to understand that I had been cast in a negative role. In 2011, when I was working at 44 State Street, I offered to share rent on the workspace. She made silver jewelry and I worked in metal. She declined, citing the price of silver. As I recall, she did not return to the shop afterward. Then came about nine years of no contact before the 2020 thread.
That is the relationship as I experienced and remember it. I don't claim that someone else has no other memories or impressions of the same period. I do say that five or six meetings, followed by nearly a decade without contact, do not match my understanding of fourteen years of knowing someone, repeated private conversations, or a sustained supportive friendship. Two people can remember an acquaintance differently. The issue is that these descriptions entered a public discussion about me, before an audience of thousands, as an explanation of my character and conduct.
The restraining-order language
Comments continued to appear in September beneath the June post.
On September 12, 2020, at 9:34 a.m., Anderson wrote that there were restraining orders against me for holding a grudge and harassing women, including her. Twelve minutes later, she added that this came from "first hand 1:1 experience," and that being tagged in the thread was not making her feel very safe.
On September 13, at 9:26 a.m., the wording of the comment had changed. "There are restraining orders" had become "there were efforts towards restraining orders." Those are not equivalent claims. The first says that restraining orders existed. The second refers to efforts to obtain them.
I have kept screenshots, the comment text, and the available edit history. I have not located a restraining order against me in the publicly accessible court records I reviewed. I don't claim that my search proves no attempt, inquiry, filing, or informal protective step ever occurred. I claim only what the comment and its revision show: a categorical statement about existing restraining orders was later replaced with a narrower statement about efforts toward them.
The statement that being tagged did not make her feel safe remained visible in the thread. I can't establish what another person felt. I can establish that a claim about existing restraining orders appeared in a public thread and was later revised.
Audience and consequence
The thread did not stay a small private disagreement. It drew 436 comments and about 22,000 views. It included comments calling for violence against me or for my physical removal. I knew that some of the people in that thread knew where I lived.
I don't attribute every hostile comment in that thread to Anderson. I don't claim she wrote, directed, or controlled them, and the record should keep that distinction clear. But the setting mattered to me. A local public official called me "a little unhinged" and "a conspiracy theorist type," publicly referred first to restraining orders and later to efforts toward restraining orders, and wrote that being tagged made her feel unsafe, in a thread that was already widely shared. I experienced that not as an ordinary disagreement but as something capable of shaping how strangers judged my danger, my credibility, and my standing in the community.
For years afterward, I left a light on at home. I don't offer that as proof of anyone's intent. It is a record of how I responded to the situation as I lived it.
Why this record exists
This document is not the argument for Pocumtuck State of Mind. That proposal has to be judged on its own: by its history and research, the quality of its governance design, the willingness of Indigenous nations and descendant communities to take part, and whether any real benefit reaches those communities.
Nor does this document say that Anderson was obliged to engage with the proposal, endorse it, answer a message, or take a public position on it. Her public role doesn't take away her freedom to decline contact.
Its purpose is narrower. A public account of my character and legal history exists. I dispute material parts of it. I have preserved the language and its revision as they appeared, and I am setting down my own record of the acquaintance, my records search, and how I experienced the consequences of that episode.
"The Empty Base" stands on its own. Its invitation is open to anyone with standing to accept, reject, revise, or ignore it.
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The Empty Base: Rhonda Anderson, Tomantha Sylvester, and What Removal Left on the Mohawk TrailPennsylvania sculptor Rodman Shutt made him, and he went up in 1974.[2] In 2009 Sonam Lama, a Tibetan immigrant, bought the shop, renamed it Native and Himalayan Views, and kept the statue. In October 2022, Tomantha Sylvester, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and a team member at the Ohketeau Cultural Center in Ashfield, started a petition calling the figure a racist stereotype: Plains imagery on ground that is not Plains ground, a caricature that made invisible the nations actually tied to this valley. It drew more than 1,300 signatures.[3] A petition to keep him circulated too. Sylvester, Rhonda Anderson, the Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs and a co-founder of Ohketeau, and Laurel Davis-Delano, a Springfield College sociologist, met with Lama about the figure and the shop.[4] Anderson later said she had been working for more than a decade to see the statue come down.[5] Lama offered to redesign the figure's head and asked the public to choose among three designs.[6] Those plans fell through. The figure was sold, and the new owners said he was coming to a good home. The base stayed empty.
The sale was not an accident of the market. It followed months of discussion among the shop's owners, Sylvester, Anderson, and others, with the Charlemont Historical Commission asking to take part.[7] As the figure came off its base, Bob Pollak, a family friend who represented the owners, called it an imperfect solution, the best they could come up with, a compromise in which everybody got some of what they wanted.[8] Sylvester said she was glad to see it go, and that even though it wasn't being destroyed, the dispute had opened a strong discussion about stereotypes of Native Americans.[7] She also named the compromise's limit. It was still a stereotype, she said, and part of her felt the problem had just moved on to another state.[5]
She was right about where it went. The object is physically unchanged, but its meaning is not decided by Massachusetts alone. The figure now stands in Vinita, a town founded in 1871 in the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory and located today within the Cherokee Nation Reservation,[9] in a state where thirty-eight federally recognized tribes are headquartered.[10] Indigenous people and residents in northeastern Oklahoma have their own histories, jurisdictions, and authority to judge him.
Beth Hilburn, one of the new owners, told the Greenfield Recorder that she traces her lineage to the Delaware Tribe of Indians and the Cherokee Nation. The cafe announced the purchase as an honor, and she said she sees the figure as an honor to all Native Americans, reporting nearly a thousand messages of thanks against a handful calling him racist.[11] Hers is a Native view, and it belongs in this account. It is one family's view, not a tribal government's position, and the published accounts I have found do not describe consultation with the Cherokee Nation's government or with other Indigenous people in Vinita before the sale.
None of that establishes that the sale was wrong, or that anyone in Massachusetts had authority to decide the figure's place in Oklahoma. The petitioner herself saw the limit on the day he left. It leaves a question that her words make fair to ask. When a contested representation is exported rather than destroyed, altered, or interpreted, what responsibility does the seller's community have to consider the ground where it will next stand?
This is not a claim that a petition creates a duty to build a replacement. The petitioners did not own the statue or the base. Selling a caricature off private commercial property is a coherent way to end a dispute. It is a thin answer to the harm the petition named. If the harm was invisibility, the visible result was less Indigenous presence on that roadside, not more. An empty base does not prove the campaign hypocritical. It does give a reason to ask whether the outcome did what the campaign said it wanted.
An interpretive response was possible before or after removal. A QR code on the figure, or on the base that remains, could have said what the object was: a 1974 fiberglass roadside figure, presented without any specific tribal affiliation, on a road whose name is a 1914 scenic-road product. Any marker there would have to identify, with named sources and Indigenous review, the several Indigenous histories connected to this valley, including Pocumtuck, Mohawk, Abenaki, Nipmuc, and Mohican histories, rather than collapsing them into a generic Indian past.[12] A code could have pointed at that history and at what precision on this ground would require. That would have been interpretation through education. None was installed at the site.
A few miles along the same road, at Mohawk Park, Hail to the Sunrise still stands: a 1932 bronze by Joseph Pollia, commissioned by the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal order whose members at the time were white. The tablet at its base reads "Hail to the Sunrise – In Memory of the Mohawk Indian."[13] Both figures are non-local images on the same named road. That comparison is fair, but it is not a matched pair. One stood on private shop land and could be sold. The other is a dedicated park monument. The useful question is what standard should govern Indigenous representation in this valley. The comparison does not say both should have come down, or neither.
The empty base is what started the rest of this. The figure came down, nothing went up in its place, and the absence sent me looking. Indigenous erasure on the roadsides of western Massachusetts is real. Black erasure sits beside it, and it is not the same erasure. Its history and its repair need their own framework, and the proposal keeps them separate for that reason.
Two crowds had already paid attention, one to remove the figure and one to keep him. I read that as an artist reads a room: a public willing to sign might be a public willing to fund a specific figure rather than a generic one. That is an artist's reading, not a financing claim. My proposal for a Greylock sculpture came out of that question, and the plan grew past the sculpture.
Pocumtuck State of Mind is a developed proposal. It is not an implemented park and not a settlement anyone has ratified. It is a distributed framework across Franklin, Berkshire, Hampshire, and Hampden counties. The Hawk Trail is the east–west corridor along Route 2, a rename offered for deliberation with homeland peoples, not declared. The Sojourner Truth corridor runs north–south, so Black history has its own body of sites. The node list runs to around a hundred, phased, starting with a first proof rather than a finished system. Fish passage and reopened waterways are part of the repair, with a nitrogen ledger as a measure that can fail in public. The governance charter is still an outline: Indigenous decision-making through the relevant Tribal Historic Preservation Officers where applicable, and through enrolled-nation and descendant-community partners identified through consultation; a separate Black-heritage commission beside them, not beneath them; benefit to descendant communities first; and Land Back proposed at the heart site, not executed. Representational choices stay with the people represented. Silence is not consent.
The proposed sculptural elements name specific people, places, materials, and orientations for review: a Corten-steel hawk at the Quadrafecta Hub facing east down the valley; a Greylock element facing west toward the mountain that carries a version of his name; a Mashalisk figure placed according to the project's historical research; and a salmon at Peskeompskut welded from reclaimed Lamson & Goodnow steel. None should proceed without review and acceptance by the nations and descendant communities whose histories they invoke.
The document is public, with no login and no fee: johnsendelbach.com/p/pocumtuck-state-of-mind.html. It has gone out to Native contacts in the valley. It has not yet been taken up, and the invitation stands. It remains a proposal until the communities it names take part in it and accept what it asks of them.
Removing an inaccurate figure and repairing the absence it exposed are different undertakings. The sale ended one local display. Repair has not begun at the site, except as a set of questions, a design proposal, and an invitation not yet accepted.
The base is still on Route 2.
The figure is in Oklahoma.
No public interpretation marks the site.
The proposal is still online.
The seat remains open.
This essay claims no endorsement, and its historical and representational claims need further review before any physical work is pursued.
— John F. Sendelbach
Shelburne Falls
Notes
Sale to Alan and Beth Hilburn; removal on August 11, 2023; repair and repainting by American Giants in Illinois; installation November 10, 2023. Daily Voice, August 2023: https://dailyvoice.com/massachusetts/hampshire-franklin/infamous-native-american-statue-along-mohawk-trail-in-charlemont-removed/ · Route 66 Road Map: https://route66roadmap.com/attractions/the-big-indian-in-vinita-oklahoma/ · Greenfield Recorder, November 13, 2023: https://recorder.com/2023/11/13/big-indian-new-home-52987425/
Rodman Shutt of Strasburg, Pennsylvania; 1974 installation; twenty-foot height; 2009 renaming of the shop. Route 66 Road Map (above) · RoadsideAmerica.com: https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/12265 · Route 66 News, August 14, 2023: https://www.route66news.com/2023/08/14/big-indian-statue-in-massachusetts-moving-to-hi-way-cafe-in-vinita/
The October 2022 petition, Sylvester's tribal citizenship, and her Ohketeau role: Greenfield Recorder, January 25, 2023: https://www.recorder.com/Charlemont-souvenir-shop-seeks-input-to-redesign-Indigenous-statue-49685289 · NEPM, October 17, 2022: https://www.nepm.org/regional-news/2022-10-17/false-stereotyping-petition-calls-for-removal-of-rte-2-statue-depicting-indigenous-man · More than 1,300 signatures: NEPM, The Fabulous 413, August 18, 2023: https://www.nepm.org/podcast/the-fabulous-413/2023-08-18/august-18th-2023-waving-goodbye-to-the-big-indian-statue
Meetings with Lama by Sylvester, Anderson, and Davis-Delano; Anderson's commission and Ohketeau roles: Greenfield Recorder, March 16, 2023: https://recorder.com/2023/03/16/tribal-reps-officials-air-thoughts-on-indigenous-statue-at-charlemont-selectboard-meeting-50269024/ · NEPM, August 18, 2023 (above).
Anderson's and Sylvester's statements at the removal: Western Mass News, August 18, 2023: https://www.westernmassnews.com/2023/08/18/shelburne-falls-statue-relocated-oklahoma-following-online-petition
Redesign plans and public vote on three designs: Greenfield Recorder, January 25, 2023 (above) · Daily Voice (above) · WWLP, August 2023: https://www.wwlp.com/news/local-news/mohawk-trail-big-indian-moved-to-route-66-in-oklahoma/
Months of discussion; the Historical Commission's role; Sylvester's comments at the removal: Greenfield Recorder, August 11, 2023: https://recorder.com/2023/08/11/following-talks-of-removal-charlemont-indigenous-statue-headed-to-oklahoma-51931505/
Pollak's quotation: Route 66 News, August 14, 2023 (above), citing the Greenfield Recorder. Pollak's role as family friend and representative: Greenfield Recorder, November 13, 2023 (above).
Vinita's founding in 1871 in the Cherokee Nation: Craig County GenWeb, https://okgenweb.net/~okcraig/towns/vinita/town_vinita.html · Craig County within the Cherokee Nation Reservation: Hogner v. State, 2021 OK CR 4, https://www.okbar.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2021-OK-CR-4-1.pdf · Cherokee Nation Office of the Attorney General: https://attorneygeneral.cherokee.gov/legal-status-of-the-cherokee-nation-reservation/
Thirty-eight federally recognized tribes headquartered in Oklahoma: Oklahoma Department of Libraries, https://oklahoma.gov/libraries/digital-resources/oklahoma-native-american-tribes.html
Beth Hilburn's account of her lineage, her statement, and the response she received: Greenfield Recorder, November 13, 2023 (above). The cafe's announcement: WWLP, August 2023 (above).
The histories named here are preliminary research directions, not settled public interpretation. Before appearing on any marker or installation, each would require documentation from named sources and review by appropriate Indigenous knowledge holders and descendant communities.
Hail to the Sunrise: sculptor, date, commission, and inscription. Pioneer Valley: https://pioneervalley.org/things-to-see/hail-to-the-sunrise/ · Inscription from the author's photograph of the tablet.