Memory on the Move: Confronting Indigenous and Settler Colonial Commemorations in Stone and Bronze

Abstract

Memory on the Move: Confronting Indigenous and Settler Colonial Commemorations in Stone and Bronze Christine M. DeLucia (bio) Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien, Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit. Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 288 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, index. Paperback. $29.95. Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory. Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. 408 pp. Figures, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. Hardcover. $39.95. Thousands of visitors trek through Plymouth, Massachusetts each year, seeking connections with the iconic terrain of English colonial settlement that took shape within longstanding Wampanoag homelands of Patuxet. Their numbers will likely grow in 2020, the 400th anniversary of Anglo-American colonization in this corner of the Atlantic World. Many gravitate toward “Plymouth Rock,” seemingly unaware of or undeterred by the fact that the rock’s purported role as a Pilgrim stepping-stone is a fiction of antiquarian remembrances. These crowds may or may not notice the towering bronze statue situated immediately behind the rock on Cole’s Hill. The statue represents the seventeenth-century Pokanoket Wampanoag leader 8sâmeeqan, as his name is spelled by the present-day Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, who met and negotiated with the Pilgrims following their arrival in 1620. The casting is the handiwork of Cyrus Edwin Dallin, an influential American sculptor who had specific intentions when he produced Massasoit for the 1921 Pilgrim tercentenary (“Massasoit” being a Wampanoag leadership title). Yet the meanings of Massasoit could never be neatly pinned down. The statue and its myriad replicas have been pivotal objects in debates over memory and meaning in Indigenous and settler colonial contexts, as Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien detail in their study of the statue’s surprisingly far-flung transits. Dallin (1861–1944) was born during the U.S. Civil War and died during the Second World War, and over the course of his long career he sculpted many figural works pertaining to American history, Native Americans, and [End Page 82] potent ideas of “pioneering” and the “frontier.” Raised in Utah Territory in close proximity to Ute, Shoshone, and other Native communities navigating tremendous upheaval and violence, Dallin developed vivid (mis)perceptions of Native people in regional as well as continental pasts and presents. He sculpted stylized “Indians” in works like his four-part The Epic of the Indian, which concluded with the iconic equestrian sculpture Appeal to the Great Spirit installed outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Dallin’s oeuvre is one of the common threads linking Monumental Mobility and historian Cynthia Culver Prescott’s Pioneer Mother Monuments, a wide-ranging survey of monuments paying gendered homage to U.S. westward expansion. Among the scores of monuments that Prescott scrutinizes is Dallin’s lofty bronze Brigham Young Pioneer Monument that he produced for Salt Lake City. Epitomizing particular forms of Anglo-American masculinity and patriarchy, the Young statue in many respects fits with Dallin’s larger oeuvre centered on influential men, Native as well as colonial. Less well-recognized is Dallin’s interest in monumentalizing women. As Prescott demonstrates in her careful reconstruction of the development and installation of Pioneer Mother (End of the Trail) in his hometown of Springville, Utah, Dallin tapped into a deeply rooted monumental pattern of using representations of Euro-American women to address present-day social dynamics and shifting gender norms. For Pioneer Mother, Dallin drew upon a likeness of his own mother, Jane Hamer Dallin, creating a half-bust bearing a wide sunbonnet atop a pedestal with a bas-relief featuring an ox-drawn covered wagon. As with scores of other “pioneer women” monuments, its representational frame included not a single Indigenous person, not even in the most grossly stereotypical form, conveying an impression of uncontested westward colonization and hardy frontier womanhood. Yet the bronze visage’s placid expression belied simmering controversy, some of which bubbled up during the monument’s dedication. Years earlier the Dallin family became estranged from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and socially ostracized in Mormon Utah, while Cyrus Dallin’s eastward transits raised questions among Utah residents about Dallin’s loyalty to...