Macon Magazine

46 maconmagazine.com | October/November 2026 sculpture was unveiled a day before the Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration, where Southeastern tribes gather in Macon for a weekend of joy and culture at the Ocmulgee Mounds. What should Maconites take from the sculpture? For Johnson, it's simple: "I want them to see that we're still connected, and we're still here. And this is — even though it's an elder that's passed on — this is still an alive, current culture and community that is actually going to be here playing stickball," he said. This distinction is important. This sculpture doesn't just intend to commemorate someone who is gone – or indeed, a whole culture that is gone from the area. It points towards something that continues, the unbroken line of culture and traditions. For Johnson, Gray was an especially fitting figure to embody that connection. "Netche is the inspiration for this bronze because I had the opportunity to meet him and ask his family members questions and learn more about him," says Johnson. "He was a stickball player who had the right to wear the tiger tail, an element of significance while playing stickball. It was an honor given by others, not something you could choose for yourself." Stickball is a traditional game played both for recreation and ceremony by a number of Indigenous nations, including the Muscogee. Historically, the game is the direct precursor to the game of lacrosse, as the oldest practiced organized sport in North America. Johnson first met Gray in real life as a child in the 1970s. Gray was imposing at six feet, four inches tall, particularly in Johnson's childhood memory, so the sculptor chose to make the piece seven feet, three inches tall to show how striking he was. ABOVE A sculpture reveal took place in front of a crowd, both Maconites and Muscogee citizens, before the Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration. TOP RIGHT Muscogee Nation citizens celebrate during the sculpture reveal. RIGHT Descendants of Netche Gray came to the sculpture unveiling in honor of their relative. Johnson remembers him for teaching songs and leading Stomp Dances, and Gray's work to preserve Muscogee culture turned into reference recordings for the Smithsonian. Descendants of Gray, such as his grandson Joe Sulphur, now 76, continued to take up the mantle of stickball, and have continued to pass on the songs and stories. As a strong connection of the passage of time and culture, Sulphur remembers his grandfather saying to him that when Gray was Sulphur's age, he had stickball opponents who had played in the Civil War. Both the figures in ECKE face west, towards Oklahoma, to acknowledge the real history of why the tribe left and to acknowledge their current home. Johnson says his hope is to eventually have a twin sculpture in Oklahoma that faces east, towards the Muscogee homelands. The female figure carved in marble and the male stickball player create an interplay of balance and cultural symbolism. Gray's sculpture also fronts a stickball-sized field to play the game in, with the hope being that as the region develops and Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park gains full national park status, that the game will one day be played locally. Bicentennial Park is the culminating effort of Macon-Bibb County's Macon200 celebration and was dedicated in November 2025. The tenor of the bicentennial celebration overtly meant to focus on stories that were untold or underexamined during the previous centennial celebration. About a month prior to the completion of "ECKE – Mother Ground" Muscogee artist Starr Hardridge debuted the collective work "Medicine River" on the corner of the park, made in collaboration with East Macon artist Randy Heart. The individual tiles that make up "Medicine River" were made by the hands of different Macon citizens. One large scale artwork remains to be installed in Bicentennial Park, a series of panels that depict different aspects of Macon's history etched in corten steel. The sculpture effort is not alone in the ways that Central Georgians are connecting to the Muscogee Nation, aiming to shorten the distance from Ocmulgee to Okmulgee, and telling stronger and more accurate history about our Indigenous origins. Street signs downtown are now displayed in the Creek language. Depictions of Muscogee fashion line the shadow boxes in the alley ways. While the bronze sculpture makes Gray seem larger than life, it might seem like a small thing, in the span of time that includes over 10,000 years of inhabitation by his ancestors on the spot where

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