Monumental Mobility - by Lisa Blee & Jean M O'Brien (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book is situated within the terrain of intense debate over the placement and displacement of monuments to difficult histories. Installed in Plymouth 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) 8sãameeqan as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But Massasoit did not remain only in Plymouth. Lisa Blee and Jean O'Brien track the physical and narrative mobility of Massasoit through its inception and its movement to numerous locations in the US to illuminate how Massasoit's attachment to national origins did and did not move with the installations. The historical memory surrounding Massasoit suggests both the rich potential of Indigenous public historians to intervene in sanitized national narratives of origins, and the ways in which this history is commodified. Can Massasoit prompt viewers to reckon with ... the structural violence of settler colonialism in commemorative landscapes, or does it further entrench celebratory narratives of national origins?"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

A welcome addition to the historiography of memory and a growing list of books focused on Indigenous monuments. Moreover, the authors' extensive work tracing the many lives of Massasoit exhibits how difficult it is to fix the meaning of an object even after it is rendered in stone."--Western Historical Quarterly

Art historians will find Monumental Mobility fascinating and rich in material for teaching courses on the ethics of museum practices and art reproduction, while public historians will find Blee and O'Brien's arguments solidly grounded in interpretive theory. . . a worthwhile read for both academics and the interested public--thanks to the indefatigable research conducted by Blee and O'Brien."--Journal of Early American History

The book documents the fascinating continental 'travels' of a statue of the Wampanoag leader Massasoit, installed in 1921 at Plymouth, Ma., to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival . . . This is an object lesson in the commodification of Native American memory."--Choice

About the Author

Lisa Blee is associate professor of history at Wake Forest University. Jean M. O'Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.