APS Part of Four-Day Celebration
Posted on 10/07/2019
(Doug Livingston for Ohio.com/Akron Beacon Journal)
Standing in a bed of indigenous grass at the corner of Merriman Road and Portage Path, the 3,200-pound statue of a Native American lifting a canoe overhead was nearly another disgrace to the culture.
Before it was set in bronze 20 years ago, its creator — Peter Jones of the Seneca and Onondaga tribes of New York — sent a 16-inch model to a foundry in Pennsylvania to be sculpted into a clay mold.
Jones depicted a slender Miami tribesman with straight hair and sinewy thighs defined by the great distances traveled to find food or carry goods along the critical Portage Path between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers. But an artist at the foundry produced the westernized caricature of an American Indian — puffy hair with comically bulging muscles and a physique that contradicted his people’s lean diet. Read more at >>.
