Hail to the Sunrise

You'll pass a bronze figure standing in a little roadside park near Charlemont — a Native man cast in metal, arms flung wide to the east, to the rising sun. They call him Hail to the Sunrise, and there's more to him than meets the eye.

He went up in nineteen thirty-two, nine hundred pounds of bronze, put there to honor the five Mohawk nations and the other Native peoples whose trail this road followed. He faces east across the Deerfield River, arms raised to greet the Great Spirit with the dawn, and on a gold October morning with the light coming up behind him, I'll tell you, he can stop your breath.

But here's the complicated part, and I won't hide it from you. The folks who raised him were a white fraternal lodge — an outfit called the Improved Order of Red Men, that dressed up in feathers and played at being Indian while, out in the real world, the actual Native people of this country were being pushed off the last of their land. So the statue is a genuine tribute and an uncomfortable one, both at the same time — real reverence, from folks who didn't always live up to it.

I think you can hold both of those things at once. Stand in front of him, look at that face turned to the sunrise, and remember the people who really walked this trail for a thousand years before anybody poured a statue. Then hail the sunrise yourself. That part, at least, they got exactly right.