In 1855 in the South Puget Sound, war broke out between Washington settlers and Nisqually Indians. A party of militiamen traveling through Nisqually country was ambushed, and two men were shot from behind and fatally wounded. After the war, Chief Leschi, a Nisqually leader, was found guilty of murder by a jury of settlers and hanged in the territory's first judicial execution. But some 150 years later, in 2004, the Historical Court of Justice, a symbolic tribunal that convened in a Tacoma museum, reexamined Leschi's murder conviction and posthumously exonerated him. In Framing Chief...

Cyrus Dallin's statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit as a welcoming participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. The story of this statue reveals much about the process of creating, commodifying, and reinforcing the historical memory of Indigenous people.