On Statues and Dead Historians

I have spent the better part of my career listening to dead people.

They speak through brittle documents cached away in archives; they speak through the typed pages of historians who have tried to resurrect their lives; they speak through the mouths of descendants who have preserved their memories through recollection and oral histories. I take each one of these voices seriously.

For Francis Godfroy, I spent the better part of two summers parsing through his correspondence, business ledgers, and legal papers at the Indiana State Library. When I returned to Oklahoma City at the beginning of the last academic year, I began assembling a rather substantial library of books on 19^th century Indiana and Miami history. As any good historian would do, I wanted to know what other historians had written. I’m perhaps overly ambitious; I wanted to make sure that I had read every published account written about Godfroy. I was startled to discover the paucity of material on the man.

I had been familiar with one of the books, Bert Anson’s The Miami Indians. It was one of the only full treatments of the Miami Indians that I could find, but it had been published in 1970. More concerning, several years ago at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, I heard scholars (more knowledgeable than myself) question major assertions in the book. Who was Anson? Why was the book so contentious?

Despite Anson’s sympathetic account of the Miami Indians, he was the product of an older generation of academic scholars who studied Native people. His work relied heavily on government documents. Consequently, indigenous people only appear in his narrative when they interact with white people (and only when that interaction is documented in the official government record). I wondered if Bert Anson, who spent his career teaching at Ball State University, would have changed his approach in light of four decades of changes in the profession.

This last thought led me to Google. I typed "Bert Anson" into the search engine and crossed my fingers. I discovered two things about Professor Anson. First, he would be unable to answer my queries in person—he died in 1992. Second, his research notes for the book were housed in Ball State University’s archives under the title, “Miami Indians Collection.” I immediately opened a second browser and started hunting for hotels in Muncie, Indiana. I had planned a two-week research trip to Indianapolis to conduct additional research in the State Library and Historical Society collections, so a few days at Ball State University made for a nice break from the routine.

In early January, after walking five blocks through a pretty nasty Midwestern snow storm, I groused into the Ball State University archives and special collections’ reading room. I asked the student worker at the desk to pull the collection and waited mere minutes before he plopped the box down on my desk. In fact, I had yet to fully unpack my computer when the first, and only, box of the collection arrived. According to the finding aid, the collection included “notes, photocopies of treaties and legal proceedings, tribal genealogies, correspondence, and other materials relating to the Miami Indian tribe.”

Scholarly standards of the 1970s must have been more lax than today, because the box yielded a total of 34 folders—most of which were filled with handfuls of photocopies. I hadn't traveled to Muncie, Indiana to see copies. I wanted to get my hands on Anson's handwritten notes, especially the notecards used in writing the book. As I opened the folder titled “Miami Indian notes, circa 1829-1831,” I was met with disappointment. The folder included two tiny bundles of notecards, bound together by old shoestrings. The entire box contained little more than 100 cards; most of them a mere line or two transcribed from government documents or the photocopies found in other folders. Could this be it? Was this the extent of his work?

I knew that the research notes for my first book numbered in the thousands. Where was the rest of Anson's research? As you might have expected, I approached the student archivist with a puzzled face. He had no answers. Instead, he pointed me to a section of the archive's website that listed other collections related to “Indians.”

What would I do for the next two and a half days? I contemplated driving to Indianapolis and abandoning my trip to Muncie, but something told me to follow the suggestions of the 20 year old desk worker. “Fine, pull every collection on this webpage,” I asked assertively (but politely).

As I thumbed through box after box of useless material, a single image kept appearing over and over again. It was seemingly everywhere--on mayoral letterhead, the city’s municipal flag, the cover of historical pageant programs, and even recreated in 1965 by the local boy scout troop as a living parade float. The image was that of a Sioux warrior on horseback, arms stretched outward, head tilted toward the sky. Why of all places did Muncie, Indiana, an area with a deep indigenous history of its own, adopt a stereotypical image of a Great Plains warrior to symbolize their Midwestern city?

I've since conducted additional research on the statue and the city's use in local iconography. My initial hypothesis is that the statue, a copy of Cryus Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit, has served as a symbolic surrogate for the region’s real lived indigenous past used to mask a community's guilt about a violent past and deflect charges of racism in the 1920s.

At the time of its installation in 1929, Muncie quickly was becoming famous as the subject of Robert and Helen Lynd’s study Middletown. In Robert Lynd’s sequel, Middletown in Transition, published in 1937, the sociologist depicted Muncie as a dysfunctional community (and hinted at community racism that targeted immigrants and African-Americans). Many of those charges seem based in truths; Muncie had been the center of a Women’s Ku Klux Klan movement in the 1920s, and editor George Dale waged war against the Klan in the pages of his Muncie newspaper. Could Dallin’s statue (often referred to as Chief Muncie by locals) and the foundational fictions that accompanied it have served many purposes for a heavily scrutinized community?

I’m not sure of the answers quite yet, but I’m already booking hotel rooms for additional nights in Indiana. I’ve spent a career listening to dead people. This time Bert Anson led me to Muncie.