BOOK REVIEWS Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit By Lisa Blee and Jean M. O’Brien
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Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 272 pp. Paper, $29.95
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This one felt like an easy fit. Having been raised in Massachusetts not too far from Plymouth, where my lifelong interest in Native Americans began, a return to my roots seemed natural and interesting. The story of the Pilgrims and their friendship with Massasoit (actually 8[W]sâmeeqan or Yellow Feather), the first Thanksgiving, and interaction with the Wampanoag Tribe was familiar territory, but why the Utah Historical Quarterly was interested in treading this wellworn path was a mystery. The two thousand miles between Plymouth and Salt Lake City and the four hundred years of history seemed too much to bridge. My educational journey was just starting. When the Improved Order of Red Men (IORM), an organization of Anglos interested in promoting Progressive ideals and a palatable national history with American values, commissioned Cyrus E. Dallin (1861–1944), a sculptor born and raised in Utah but who practiced much of his art in Massachusetts, they hoped to solidify a peaceful narrative of Indian and Pilgrim cooperation. When the IORM installed the bronze statue Massasoit on Cole’s Hill overlooking Plymouth Bay in 1921, commemorating three hundred years since the first event, they reaffirmed the narrative of friendship so often encapsulated in the first Thanksgiving story and the fifty peaceful years thereafter. Dallin apparently achieved his goal. He could not have known that not only would Massasoit be copied a number of times against his wishes, but that it would appear in some of the most unlikely places—a mall in Kansas City, Missouri; an artistic shopping plaza in Dayton, Ohio; and the Utah State Capitol, Springville Art Museum, and Brigham Young University, among others. How this happened and what it has done to the initial narrative is the subject of this book.
Following an introduction that provides contextual information about Dallin’s life and work and a brief history of the statue and its surrounding story, the authors divide the topic into four chapters. The first, “Casting,” tells of his efforts to create a realistic sculpture based not only on the topic but that also incorporated heroic ideals observed with Indians encountered through life experience. Once the statue had been placed in Massachusetts, the large mold came to Utah with the understanding that no other copies would be made; following Dallin’s death, this wish was denied. Copies eventually appeared in different parts of the country due to less than honorable circumstances. The second chapter, “Staging,” examines not only the installation of the Massachusetts statue and how site selection played an important role in furthering the accompanying narrative but also how it was received by the last descendants of Massasoit. When copies of the statue arrived in far-distant cities, mixed messages were often sent, either confusing local history or accepting irrelevancy. This gave rise to the third chapter, “Distancing,” in which a series of “man/woman-on-the-street” interviews á la Jay Leno showed just how mixed or lost the actual intent had become. Those in the IORM would have gasped at the gaps in historical memory. In a number of instances, the desired narrative, has been reversed by deep plows unearthing the dark side of the past. In both this chapter and the final one, the authors discuss how Native Americans have produced a counter-dialogue that sees the arrival of the Pilgrims as an upsurge in a genocide started earlier, how the first Thanksgiving is now a “Day of Mourning,” why the supposed fifty years of initial peace erupted into King Philip’s (Pometacomet’s) War, and how the white narrative has been totally distorted to erase real events. This is the milieu provided to discuss the broader theme of the role that statuary plays in defining—through memory, narrative, and art form—the past. For those seeking relevance to today’s world, one only has to turn on the television or pick up a news magazine to see what is happening to statues ranging from Christopher Columbus to the Founding Fathers to
