New Hampshire Tribal News

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New Hampshire Intertribal Council

Chief Peter Newell-New Hampshire Intertribal Council

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Bill Miller in Concert - Laconia, NH - May 26, 2006

Sculpture honors a native son

Bronze replaces lost statue overlooking Weirs Beach

By ELIZABETH WALTERS

Monitor staff
June 05. 2005 8:00AM

The Weirs Action Committee raised much of the money to pay for the statue - $5 at a time - by managing the beach parking lot during Bike Week.

Centuries ago, before the arcades, before the M/S Mount Washington, before New Hampshire was a state or even a colony, Weirs Beach had some of the best fishing around.

The Native Americans who lived in the region would gather there for twice-yearly festivals, said David Stewart-Smith, a historian from Webster and a member of the New Hampshire Inter-Tribal Native American Council. They set up fences underwater to catch salmon; that's how the area got its name.

"It was always a place where people felt safe and there were terrific resources for people to survive,"Stewart-Smith said.

Visitors to the Weirs now have a reminder of that history in the form of a bronze sculpture of a Native American man. The statue was officially unveiled yesterday in ceremonies that involved both speeches and Native American drumming. The figure looks out over the water from atop the granite structure that protects Endicott Rock, one of the oldest artifacts of European settlers in the United States.

The statue was the first big undertaking by the Weirs Action Committee, a group of residents formed in 1995. Their original intent was to replace the statue of a Native American that had stood on the roof of the Endicott Rock structure from 1901 until 1984, when vandals tore it down and threw it in the channel.

It was restored by the state and placed in the Laconia library. But the statue was too fragile to even to make a mold, said Joe Driscoll, an artist and hotel owner who was the committee's first president, so the organization started planning for a new statue. They also started raising money. The group got some donations to defray the project's $50,000 cost, but their main fundraiser was manning the beach's parking lot during Bike Week.

"Really, the money for this project has been raised $5 at a time down at the beach," Driscoll said.

The committee needed the state Division of Parks and Recreation to approve their plans, because Endicott rock is part of a very small state park. State officials recommended that the group consult some Native Americans living in the area, Driscoll said, so he and Bob Morton, an artist from Ashland who came onto the project as an adviser and who ended up creating the sculpture, met with the Inter-Tribal Council. Councilors told them which details might be appropriate for the statue and which wouldn't.

"They suggested that I stay away from feathered headdresses,"Morton said. "Most Indians end up with a Sioux war bonnet, which was a Western thing."

In a speech yesterday, Morton thanked one woman on the council who told him that "all Native Americans don't have hooked noses."

Morton also did a lot of research on his own, much of it in collections at the University of Pennsylvania. He learned that although they might not wear a full feather bonnet, most Native Americans did wear headdresses, so he chose to top the figure's head with that of a mountain lion, because that animal would have ranged freely in this area. The Native American atop the monument wears a bear-claw neckpiece modeled on a shaman's necklace that Morton saw at a museum in Colorado. His left arm is folded across his chest, and his figure is draped in a blanket, another thing the Inter-Tribal Council recommended. Blankets served a variety of uses - as coats, as sleeping bags, as tents.

"We were told a blanket was something that all natives would have, and to this day, a blanket would be a very significant gift for one of our native peoples to get and to give," Driscoll said.

The statue's right arm is extended in an easterly direction, a nod to the sacredness of the East in native culture.

The overall effect is a composite of details common to the groups who lived around the lake. (New Hampshire's Native Americans were mostly Abenaki and are generally referred to as Penacooks, Stewart-Smith said.)

"He's not really an Abenaki, he's not a Sioux, he's not a specific Native American, but he's kind of a general one for this area," Morton said.

In terms of accuracy, the statue is a vast improvement over the figure that stood there before, said Peter Newell, the chief of the Inter-Tribal Council. According to Driscoll, the old statue was a garden ornament purchased from a catalog, Driscoll said.

"There's a picture of him," he said. "Painted or bronzed, a hundred bucks."

It was nicknamed "Captain Jack," Driscoll said, because it was the mascot of the Captain Jack Tobacco Co., a moniker that offended many Native Americans.

By contrast, "This is the type of Indian that would've lived here,"Newell told the crowd that gathered to see the statue yesterday. "The music you heard this morning would be the music you heard here."

Newell welcomed the statue as a reminder that the history of America begins long before any Europeans set foot on it. Indirectly, the statue might also serve as a nod to Native Americans' contributions as the colonies were forming; Endicott Rock, which marked the northernmost boundary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is inscribed with the governor's name and the initials of the settlers who claimed it in 1652, but it makes no mention of the native guides who led the explorers there.

Newell said he hoped the sculpture was the beginning of more collaborations among Native Americans and other Americans.

"There needs to be a huge, huge healing to go on in this country," he said. "People need to work together and do things together and realize that we're all brothers and sisters. That's what happened here. It wasn't just white people and Indians, it was brothers and sisters working together."

(Elizabeth Walters can be reached at 224-5301, ext. 317, or by e-mail at Elizabeth Walters)

End of article
By ELIZABETH WALTERS
Monitor staff

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Last updated on April 26, 2006