Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit

Abstract

In 2017, after a long reclamation battle, the Wampanoag ceremonially reinterred artifacts and remains associated with the seventeenth-century leader 8sâmeeqan (Ousamequin). Massasoit, the name widely used in histories and Thanksgiving pageants, was a title signifying 8sâmeeqan’s leadership role. A century earlier, a Euro-American fraternal order called the Improved Order of Red Men (IORM) commissioned a sculpture to commemorate the tricentennial of the pilgrims’ 1620 encounter with the Massasoit and his people.As current controversies attest, “the urge to commemorate” is never a straightforward one. In this timely book, Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien trace the creation and installation of the Massasoit memorial on Cole Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and its remarkable afterlife.Monumental Mobility explores the “memory work” of public history: “how individuals and collectivities make meaning of the past as distinct from the concrete matter of what actually happened” (7). O’Brien brilliantly addressed these themes in her earlier work on settler colonialism in New England, where displacement of Indigenous people from local history went hand in hand with dispossessing them from their land. The IORM hoped a monument on Cole’s Hill looking out over Plymouth harbor would cement the landing’s importance in the nation’s history. Achieving this goal meant presenting the European arrival as a peaceful encounter welcomed by Indigenous people, thus “shedding the violence” and exculpating guilt around dispossession. Sculptor Cyrus Dallin, raised in Utah Territory and an avid consumer of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, brought his own stereotypes to the commission.Press for the unveiling advertised the presence of 8sâmeeqan’s “only living descendant,” Wootonekanuske/Charlotte Mitchell. The “disappearing Indian” image was so prevalent that newspapers casually erased her siblings and cousins. Mitchell resisted the subordinate role assigned to her in “helping celebrate the killing of my own people” (75). As the statue was unveiled and the band played the Star-Spangled Banner, she turned away from the camera and spoiled the shot. The Mitchells and other Wampanoag activists used commemoration events to bolster land claims and to subvert the narrative of disappearance. On Thanksgiving 1970, United American Indians protesters staged a “Day of Mourning.” They painted the Massasoit statue with red and buried Plymouth Rock in sand. Activism gained the Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoags authorship: they shaped interpretation to reflect Indigenous perspectives at Plimoth Plantation and Cole’s Hill, and in their own exhibits.The statue’s history outside New England occupies a significant portion of the book. Dallin donated the plaster cast to the state capitol, but it ended up at Brigham Young University. There, curators engaged in an elaborate tax fraud that involved making unauthorized new castings. The Massasoit figure became a generic trope untethered from tribe, geography, and history, with miniatures sold in tourist shops and larger copies installed in malls, museums, and sculpture parks in Kansas City, Spokane, Chicago, Dayton, and Salt Lake City. This mobility permits Blee and O’Brien to investigate settler colonial narratives in the West. Utah officials rejected Dallin’s proposal for a statue honoring Shoshone leader Washakie and removed the Massasoit from its place of honor in the capitol to make way for representations of Utah history centered on Mormon migrants, actions that simulated the literal dispossession of Utes, Navajos, and Shoshones. Brigham Young University framed its Massasoit statue as a “helper,” a symbol of Indigenous self-sacrifice necessary for Europeans to thrive.If memorials say more about who erected them than they do about the past, sponsors and artists cannot always control the message. Showcasing Blee’s public history expertise, the authors surveyed visitors’ responses to the Massasoit statues. In Kansas City and Dayton, Massasoit stands with other sculptures or art, convincing some that 8sâmeeqan was important without teaching much history. In Provo, the semi-nude statue’s violation of campus dress codes draws more comment than its historical message. Still, for a few individuals the monument inspires reflection about local Indigenous groups and America’s national narrative. As colonized people around the globe tear down monuments, this fascinating book offers a blueprint for closing the gap between the past and present understandings of history.