GBH Daily: A monument to Indigenous communities

This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed. ☂️A chance of showers with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 6:06 p.m. We are off for the holiday today and bringing you one great story about how a new monument could create a new gathering place honoring local indigenous communities in the heart of Boston. See you back in your inboxes with a full edition tomorrow morning. Franklin Park could get Boston’s first monument honoring Indigenous communities There’s a new monument being planned for Boston’s Franklin Park. White Pine Gathering Place is being designed by a company called SmokeSygnals, which specializes in art installations and exhibits that tell Native stories. “I think this monument really is a step toward healing,” Steven Peters, creative director of SmokeSygnals and a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, told GBH’s Diane Adame. “It’s a step towards finally feeling as though we have a platform as Native Americans to be able to develop a space and share a story that we feel as though truly reflects who we are.” The design will have a pot at its center, with inscriptions of the story of Moshup, a giant from Wampanoag mythology who dragged his foot along the coast to create the bay between the areas now known as Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. Around the pot will be benches and Corten steel poles which represent red cedar. They’ll be surrounded by white pine trees, representing life for people in the Wampanoag tribe. SmokeSygnals is working with the city and trying to raise $2 million for the monument. Once the money is in place, it will take about two years to build. It’s noteworthy to have a monument for Wampanoag people within Boston city limits: Colonial law prohibited Native people from entering Boston city limits in 1675, and that law was on the books until its repeal in 2005. “There’s many monuments and memorials and public art that not only invisibilize Native American and Indigenous people, but they also glorify the story of colonialism, which has been very hurtful for Indigenous communities,” Erin Genia, Boston’s first Indigenous Public Art and Cultural Spaces consultant and a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe in the Dakotas, told Adame. “It’s really important that we begin to tell those stories from an Indigenous perspective.” You can read more about this project and see more renderings of the proposed monument here.