On my way from Pittsburgh to Wooster, I usually take 76 to Suffield, then trek across to Brimfield, Barberton, and eventually Smithville to avoid the Akron highways, which are perpetually under construction. However, on Saturday, I decided to experiment and take a different route: from 76, I took a scenic way through small towns and rolling hills to East Canton, and then eventually made my way to route 30. As I pulled off 30 into downtown Wooster, right where the Great and War trails would have crossed, I made a quick turn to see the memorial that was placed in Schellin Park for the city’s bicentennial in 2008. It is the most prominent public display of Indigenous history in the area, so I wanted to go see what it said and how it differed from the ways that I narrated Indigenous history. The memorial explains the area’s transition from Indigenous lands to a white settler’s town in five pillars. One slab described the Fulkes Massacre, which I talk about at length (or, as much length as I’m allowed to have in a digital project).
To my surprise and intrigue, someone “edited” the slab to reinterpret the event, calling it a “mass murder” whereas the memorial deemed it a “conflict.” Other words, like “asleep,” and “all sixteen were killed,” had been underlined, underscoring the contradiction between these details and the labeling of the event as a “conflict.” Interestingly, some of these details are not in Douglass’s account.
I immediately whipped out my phone and snapped a picture. I had so many questions: who did this? Was it a Wooster resident, a college student who wandered off campus, or someone passing through who decided to have a picnic at the nearby tables? How long ago did this happen? Were the folks who created the memorial aware of this? At any rate, it was fascinating to see someone directly engage with rhetoric that was ultimately passed down from Howe and Douglass to today’s local historians and voice their issues with this piece of public history, albeit in a way that damages the memorial.
This memorial tells me something very important about my audience: depending on who you are, what you’ve read, and who you want to communicate with, you may have a very different interpretation of events, and what they mean, from the person next door. Something violent, horrible, almost unspeakable happened on this plot of ground. The people involved are long gone, and the descendants of the victims are no longer in the area. How do we make sense of all of that? How do we see the humanity in people who haven’t been given it in the past, and contend with the messiness of how Wooster and Ohio became a part of this country?
Not surprisingly, all these questions are difficult to answer but are deserving of serious reflection. Douglass, the memorial vandal, the folks who built the memorial, and I are all trying to answer these questions from four different sets of experiences and backgrounds. Ultimately, none of us were there. However, when we write an interpretation of an event, we possess a certain kind of power over those who were there and those who connect with the story. We can make decisions about who is seen as the hero, who is seen as having been wronged, or even who is seen as deserving to live as a result. As we’ve seen, this power has to be wielded responsibly, as an interpretation can produce completely different accounts of the same event.