Monumental Mobility

The Memory Work of Massasoit

Lisa Blee, Jean M. O'Brien

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469648415
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Native American Studies

Installed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 to commemorate the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin's statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit (leader) as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But after the statue's unveiling, Massasoit began to move and proliferate in ways one would not expect of generally stationary monuments tethered to place. The plaster model was donated to the artist's home state of Utah and prominently displayed in the state capitol; half a century later, it was caught up in a surprising case of fraud in the fine arts market. Versions of the statue now stand on Brigham Young University's campus; at an urban intersection in Kansas City, Missouri; and in countless homes around the world in the form of souvenir statuettes. As Lisa Blee and Jean M. O'Brien show in this thought-provoking book, the surprising story of this monumental statue reveals much about the process of creating, commodifying, and reinforcing the historical memory of Indigenous people. Dallin's statue, set alongside the historical memory of the actual Massasoit and his mythic collaboration with the Pilgrims, shows otherwise hidden dimensions of American memorial culture: an elasticity of historical imagination, a tight-knit relationship between consumption and commemoration, and the twin impulses to sanitize and grapple with the meaning of settler-colonialism.

Chapter One

CASTING

The heroic-sized bronze Massasoit stands alone on its rock pedestal in Plymouth, a solitary figure facing the bay. The monument—and its reproductions—may suggest a certain proud loneliness wherever it stands, but it embodies a plethora of ideas, influences, and desires. The Massasoit story in fact involves a large cast of characters beyond 8sâmeeqan. Even the statue itself had a role to play, both in staging a historical drama about national origins in Plymouth and in sparking memories, controversies, and debates there and far away from the Pokanoket leader’s historical domain. The Massasoit story did not freeze time and space as those who sought to memorialize this history intended. Rather, the actual course of events surrounding it dramatized the ways in which the meaning of monuments is a dynamic and socially produced phenomenon rather than a way to capture history and fix it in place.

How did Massasoit come to take center stage in this historical drama, and what other characters deserve billing in this historical production? Some are obvious: the sculptor Cyrus Dallin who fashioned the likeness, the Improved Order of Red Men, the Massasoit Memorial Association, and the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth outlined the script by taking up the idea, raising the funds, hiring the sculptor, and selecting the original location for the drama to be staged. Dallin turned to historical research about 8sâmeeqan and his own memories of growing up in the shadow of the Wasatch Range of Utah. As a boy, he recalled playing with Native companions and observing the diplomatic performance of treaty making; as a young sculptor, he was dazzled by the pageantry of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Paris and inspired by the performers’ bodies and clothing. He also employed at least one human model while working on his sculpture. All of these experiences influenced how he cast Massasoit for residence on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth.

Indigenous people play multiple roles in this drama, even though the scripting of their roles has changed over time. While Massasoit is the lead actor on Cole’s Hill, the non-Indian script writers of the time cast the still-present Wampanoag people in bit roles with no lines during the unveiling of Massasoit, even though they had plenty to say about the story, as we shall see in the next chapter. After 1970, Native people themselves rewrote the script, challenging the totalizing narratives the IORM sought to implant that denied the settler colonialism inherent in the entire project of memorializing this history as one of the welcoming embrace of English colonialism in the service of American patriotism.

This historical drama became infinitely more complicated following Dallin’s decision to donate the plaster model for Massasoit for display in the capitol of his home state of Utah in 1922. Utah officials’ seemingly benign gesture of recognition of the sculptor’s fame and accomplishments resulted in a new drama in which Massasoit, recast as a commodity, was surrounded by an ensemble of museum managers, art dealers, and collectors hoping to make a profit. Together they mobilized the posthumous reproductions that would cast Massasoit in new roles in Salt Lake City, Provo, Springville, Kansas City, suburban Chicago, Spokane, and Dayton and perhaps elsewhere. In all of these ways, the Massasoit story told through various iterations of Massasoit continues to be rescripted and recast as a dynamic and socially produced historical drama tightly connected to the changing meanings of monuments and place over time.

THE SCULPTOR

In the 1880s and 90s, Cyrus Dallin’s fame was on the rise. The sculptor began to win awards at European competitions and international expositions. His American career seemed assured when a Boston commission selected his anonymous entry for the Paul Revere memorial statue in 1884. But there was a problem. When civic leaders, competition commissioners, and the city’s cultural elites discovered the design came from a young Utahan from a so-called pioneer family, the project was put on hold. On second thought, Dallin’s entry began to look a little too rough to the Boston commission members. Perhaps the energy in the figure reflected Wild West lawlessness or carried the taint of Mormonism rather than the refinement one expects from a sculptor who truly understood his New England subject matter. Dallin (a Unitarian with a studio near Boston) labored for the next fifty-five years—the rest of his American career—to revise the Revere statue to the patrons’ satisfaction.¹ But what ultimately vaulted Dallin’s artistic reputation and made him into a significant figure in the American fine arts and commemoration movements was his turn to subjects about which he claimed personal and authentic knowledge: Native people and western sensibilities. As a western miner’s son trying to succeed as a sculptor in the rarified air of eastern society, Dallin took a different tack when crafting his reputation and creative works. He cast himself as the embodiment of the authentic West and a civilized conduit of Indian aesthetics. His Indian statuary, meanwhile, embodied Dallin’s notions of classic beauty and modern manliness.

Dallin often repeated in speeches and interviews that he was “born and raised in a two- room log cabin on the frontier in Utah.” While such an upbringing might have been a liability for a classically trained sculptor seeking commissions from eastern patrons, Dallin framed these humble beginnings as a strength. The log cabin was a powerful national symbol that referenced such luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, reinforced the Horatio Alger myth, and commemorated a patriotic past.² Dallin’s boyhood in the log cabin on the Wasatch Range in the 1860s not only meant he was fully American; it also gave him access to unmediated nature and imaginative space unsullied by the artificiality of urban modernity. “The stars were my comrades,” he told one journalist in 1938. “I slept out of doors spring to late fall. In the winter the cabin seemed stuffy.”³ The domestic space of the cabin, much like modern life, confined and stifled creativity and boyish energy. Dallin found true inspiration not only in nature, but in western Indian art. In this way, Dallin appealed to popular ideas in the arts and crafts movement in which Indian culture was considered a counteracting force to the crippling effects of modernity.

In a speech before the Plymouth Women’s Club in the 1890s, Dallin claimed that he had a different understanding of Indians than did most easterners, and in fact he owed his “first awakening to art and beauty” to his Ute neighbors. While his log cabin was unadorned, simply utilitarian, in Ute crafts Dallin saw color and composition that appealed to the imagination. “I can well remember the positive ache in my little soul when I followed them about coveting their beautifully decorated trappings,” Dallin mused. “They seemed to me denizens of another world, a world of beauty and romance in which I longed to enter and which the drab and prosaic hardships of frontier existence was far removed.”⁴ Like other artists and collectors in this period, Dallin saw a therapeutic value in proximity to another, more authentic culture.⁵

Dallin’s tendency to equate Indians with nature reflected Euro-American expectations of Indians as closer to effete emotion and further from masculine intellect. To be sure, this was part of the appeal of proximity to Indianness: Dallin said that “the Indians [sic] reaction to the color of nature is not esoteric or aesthetic, but a perfectly natural one.”⁶ Indians have an intuitive feel for beauty, but civilized Americans had the capacity to benefit from nature by following rules of composition and cultivating aesthetic appreciation. While nature is correlated with the Indigenous and feminized spheres, the truly civilized individual can translate these elements into masculine “high art.”⁷ Dallin credited Indigenous artists and bodies for his inspiration, yet he alone—as a western artist—could transmit an Indian sensibility into art. And how might Dallin’s Indian sculptures serve the greater good as public art?

In Massasoit and his other Indian statuary, Dallin hoped to marry the didactic principles of public art with the careful study and sympathy required of monuments. The task of the sculptor, Dallin lectured his Boston art students, is to select the “dominant characteristics” of nature and then combine and arrange them to “express the larger, deeper, and more abiding truths.”⁸ This work of “elevation” is important because the products of such work—public memorials—serve a civic and didactic purpose. Dallin explained that memorials should not only celebrate heroic men and deeds, they should also add beauty to America’s public squares and inspire viewers’ aesthetic appreciation.⁹ Dallin looked to Europe as an example of the salutary effects of public art on society, and he feared that Americans’ hostility toward the genre would “leave us plunged in barbarism.”¹⁰ Dallin’s answer to this threat was not only to translate Indians’ intuitive sense of beauty into high art, but to also present idealized male Indian bodies as public art memorials that would inspire and cultivate the civilized mind. Although memorials were often criticized in the early twentieth century for being overly emotional, Dallin conceived of masculine Indian sculpture as a counteracting force to effete civilization. Unlike other memorials to revered individuals or a collection of soldiers, Dallin’s monuments sought to recast Indian men more generally as desirable, inspiring, and educational figures.

Dallin’s discussions of his artwork therefore focused on Indians’ intuitive love of beauty and on Indian bodies—which struck Dallin as decidedly and idyllically manly. In the speech delivered to the Plymouth Women’s Club, Dallin explained that Indians possessed “fine, manly qualities,” as opposed to the image of “the blood thirsty savage” that dominates in New England. Dallin offered a corrective to New England stereotypes by asserting that the Native people he encountered in his youth in the West—apparently all men—modeled the gentlemanly virtues of honor and self-restraint. The purpose of his sculptures of Indians, then, was to convey this truth about Indian history and to create an inspiring model of manliness for non-Indian viewers. Dallin was not a cultural outlier in his obsession with male bodies at the turn of the century; although white men were considered to be at the apex of civilization, some feared that men and boys would be harmed by decadence unless taught to tap into the primitive aspects of their psyches—a primitiveness that came all too easily to nonwhites who threatened white male dominance. Dallin contributed to the construction of manhood in this period by fashioning himself as a model, and Massasoit as a desirable symbol, that could inspire white men to be properly civilized and savage at once.¹¹

Dallin’s carefully crafted artistic origin stories in the West and in proximity to real Indians were essential to the appeal of his sculptures and the work they could do as public art. In speeches and interviews, Dallin recounted those elements of his biography that proved his special importance as a civilized conduit of primitive beauty and authenticity. Notably, eastern art critics and journalists eagerly reported on Dallin’s origins, perhaps adding flourishes and details along the way. As the story goes, as a boy in the Salt Lake Valley, Dallin played “warrior games” with local Indian boys, including one game in which they made balls and other shapes out of clay. Eastern sources interpreted this as his introduction to clay modeling.¹² The oft-repeated narrative of his discovery as a sculptor is set in the Tintic Mining District (named for Paiute chief Tintic), located thirty-eight miles southwest of Springville. During the summer of 1879, teenaged Dallin worked with his father at the silver mine where, on his breaks, Dallin formed an impressive bust from clay that caught the attention of a wealthy patron, who insisted he develop his talent in an eastern art academy.¹³

When his family and sponsors raised enough money to send Dallin to study with a Boston master in 1880 at the age of eighteen, he had another transformative experience. By his own telling, on the first leg of his journey east, Dallin was joined on the train by a delegation of Lakota leaders headed to Washington, D.C. “Those four days on that slow train gave me a deep and abiding respect for those fine-looking specimens of manhood,” Dallin later wrote. And he observed these male bodies with particular interest: “When they took their morning ablutions, I watched with [an] artist’s eye, their huge, graceful torsos, their clear bronze skin, their muscular bodies, their rippling muscles, and was fascinated with them.” Although the language barrier apparently prevented an exchange of ideas, Dallin was deeply impressed by what he called “perfect specimens of athletic development and discipline.” His observations of these men’s bodies made such a profound impression on the artist that he claimed the experience influenced his life and art for the next half century.¹⁴

Despite this deep impression, Dallin did not actually sculpt an Indian figure for nearly a decade, until he once again came into contact with male Plains Indian bodies, this time in Europe. In 1889, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show played a six-month engagement in Paris while Dallin was studying at a Parisian art institute. The sculptor later reported that the sight of Indians and their colorful regalia conjured up vivid images from his Utah childhood. For several weeks, Wild West performers posed for Dallin after the shows. A man named Phillip, the son of Chief Rocky Bear, served as the preliminary study for Dallin’s first major Indian equestrian, Signal of Peace. The Wild West show and resulting statue represented a complex act of cultural transference and memory blurring. The idea for the pose in Signal of Peace came to Dallin when he saw a Wild West performer lift a spear over his head. The artist claimed the vision conjured a mental image from D...