Cyrus Dallin's statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit as a welcoming participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. The story of this statue reveals much about the process of creating, commodifying, and reinforcing the historical memory of Indigenous people.
Despite popular belief, Native peoples did not simply disappear from colonial New England as the English extended their domination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, the Native peoples in such places as Natick, Massachusetts, creatively resisted colonialism, defended their lands, and rebuilt kin networks and community through the strategic use of English cultural practices and institutions. So why did New England settlers believe that the Native peoples had vanished? In this thoroughly researched and astutely argued study, historian Jean M. O’Brien reveals that, in the late eighteenth century, the Natick tribe experienced a process of “dispossession by degrees,” which rendered them invisible within the larger context of the colonial social order, thus enabling the construction of the myth of Indian extinction.
"In Stars Burn Regardless, Jean O'Brien writes as a seer, with a vision that travels beneath and through the worlds she inhabits. With stunning language and original voice, she travels the edges of things: the earth/sea/sky--the bones/bodies/ash. These relentless poems, sometimes liquid, sometimes standing straight up on hard ground, shift into the unfathomable and unspeakable as they name the deaths of up to 800 children whose bodies were dumped in a septic tank at the Mother & Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway: Ragged bundles of stick bones tiny as dolls and skulls/the size of tennis balls... O'Brien is a writer who writes the threshold, and then opens the door to shifting transformations of the body and its place on the planet, never backing down from the fevers and the ecstasies." - Jan Beatty, The Body Wars - University of Pittsburgh Press "These poems rise to their occasion, they are tough, tender, generous, passionate and deeply engaged--I cannot recommend Stars Burn Regardless highly enough." - Mark Roper, poet and librettist