9. Glacial Lakes, Strands of Kelp
9. Glacial Lakes, Strands of Kelp
A bright autumn afternoon, and our group of families is out hiking again. This is the Mountain Lakes reserve, just a few miles northeast of Goldens Bridge, but my first time venturing here. The rock outcroppings are larger - cousins to those on the way up to the cistern in the woods back on our small cliffs - so that they seem to keep in scale to the children’s lengthening bodies.
A slow steady climb brings us to a clearing; we see the outlook point and are at a run. A valley spreads out before us, a wider sky than can be seen from the top of our ridges back home. The trees are in full autumn array of oranges, ochres, and reds among the green. And there in the distance are three broad lakes - Rippowam, Oscaleta, Waccubuc. I didn’t know they existed, hadn’t seen the watershed from this vantage. And this is a different waterscape, unaltered by conquest. These lakes stand separate from the captured Croton reservoir system to the southwest. The glaciers carved out this basin twenty thousand years ago and left them here with us.
This view of the glacial lakes opens for me a next horizon toward a fuller understanding of these lands I’ve grown up in. And, slowly, a way forward to form relationships with Native people living here now, and those living elsewhere but still connected to the Hudson Valley. I’ve learned a few things which I’ll share here, not in any definitive way.
The Indigenous people of the Hudson Valley are part of the Stockbridge-Munsee-Mohican Nation, sharing language, culture and kinship. Amidst the continuing land theft and massacres like those at Pound Ridge, the Native people who had lived near Goldens Bridge - this area was called Wappinger as part of the larger region - had been driven from this watershed by the early 1800’s. Bonnie Hartley, a Tribal Preservation Manager of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation, tells that
We have a thriving tribe with continued leadership that has existed since time immemorial. We have come a long ways from the devastation that occurred after [European] contact. We are so far from our homeland, first forced to Stockbridge, then multiple times west, and onto the worst land in Wisconsin. After all that, it is really a remarkable story of resiliency that we even exist at all. (1)
Since their exile in the early 1800’s, Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans have returned again and again to engage in ongoing land claims on these still-unceded lands, to repatriate their ancestors’ remains for reburial, and to reclaim ancient items of cultural significance. From their offices in Stockbridge, MA and Troy, NY, they continue to fight to protect ancestral tribal lands and sacred burial sites from further development, and to renew relationship with their homelands in the Northeast,
Shawn Stevens, a leader of the Mohican Nation, shares the story of first coming home to his people’s ancestral lands in the Hudson Valley:
In 2004 the Albany Museum had some bones of our ancestors to repatriate back to the tribe. I came out with my mentor and our drum group and before even stepping off the bus in Albany, I remember this feeling. Coming out on the highway, these two mountains opened up and this whole valley opened up. It was happiness, and gratitude… I knew we were in our homelands. It was almost like the rising sun. Everybody was just so quiet, we were just in awe, looking out across the land knowing that this was the place where our peoples’ god-given lands were for tens of thousands of years. Everywhere I went on the land and in the woods I could swear there were ancestors happily looking at me behind the trees. It was amazing. There was a big shift. After that we started making more and more contacts from people who wanted to know about us and our history. (2)
I had the honor to spend a day with Shawn last October. I picked him up in Ossining, New York, where the Dominican Sisters of Hope have a large parcel of land overlooking the Hudson. The Sisters are inviting Shawn and Stockbridge Munsee Mohican youth to come this summer and use their place as a home base for being back on their homeland, as part of some form of restorative action.
I drove Shawn downriver from Ossining to the Shinnecock Bay on the south shore of Long Island. There we met up with leaders from Land Justice Futures, a visionary organization that works to create land transitions rooted in racial and ecological healing. LJF is working with the Sisters of St. Joseph and with the Shinnecock Indian Nation, the original stewards of lands on Long Island.
After decades and centuries of fighting to keep their land and protect their burial sites across the bay, a group Shinnecock women have also now begun to re-introduce kelp to coastal waters that have been poisoned and choked of life by continuing colonial development. Kelp, we learned from the Shinnecock women, is a keystone species that has the capacity to detoxify water, to create habitat and regenerate marine life, including the clams, oysters and scallops they remember harvesting as young girls from the sands of their reservation.
These Shinnecock Kelp Farmers have painstakingly learned to re-propagate kelp. They invited us inside to a repurposed kitchen where they’ve built a system of large tanks of water that they must first purify, with tubes leading to smaller fish tanks where the microscopic beginnings of a new crop of kelp seedlings were growing. They showed us the chest-high gators and internal thermal elements they use for wading into the late autumn waters where they will, with great delicacy and skill, drape the tiny strands of kelp on lines of rope they’ve anchored there, where the seedlings can reach maturity. They led our group to the edge of the coastal water, pointed out the buoys marking their kelp grow lines.
As we left the shore, Shawn asked the Shinnecock women whether he might make an offering in gratitude for their work. He turned and faced the bay. And right there at the edge of the continent Shawn let loose a song the likes of which I have never heard, in a language I do not know, and the sonic quality and power of which I cannot try to describe. Yet, having spent the day with him and witnessing the work of the Shinnecock sisters, and with tears streaming down our faces in listening, it seemed to me that Shawn was singing a song of praise and of mourning and of blessing and of prophecy. Of praise of these women, sisters of the bay, of their holy labor. A song of mourning of the destruction of life, of exile. Of blessing, that their determined work may thrive. A song of prophecy, of fulfilling a vision that kelp forests will soon again fill the Shinnecock Bay, that they will bring life back to these waters.
And a song from his own people, whose home had been and still is upriver of this bay. This bay who receives the river’s waters and returns them in two-way estuarial flow, the water of the streams, the swamps, the glacial lakes, that I have come to know in recent generations.
Through this day’s journey with Shawn, and as from my first view of the glacial lakes, I’ve begun to get a larger understanding of the watershed and its history. The Mohican, or Mahican, named themselves after the river, Mahicannituck, the waters that flow two ways and are never still. The Mahicannituck River (currently called Hudson) that flows into the New York harbor, wrapping arms around its islands, among them Manahatta (Manhattan) and Paumanok (Long Island). Taconic, Tappan, Ossining, Waccubuc, Rippowam, Oscaleta - all the place names echo differently now.
In our conversation earlier that morning as we followed the river’s route to the sea, Shawn imparted many things to me. Of the stories of his grandmother, of her captivity in “boarding school” from a young age, the stripping of her language and culture. Of the intergenerational trauma descending, and how he sees the process of healing in his and current generations. Of the joy and the challenge of reclaiming his native languages - not unlike regenerating those strands of kelp, I now think. That after 200 years, he and his people are now home on their Wisconsin land. That within a few generations even after a migration of forced marches and violent betrayals, a sense of belonging to land can be regenerated in a different place. And of his people’s continuing deep connection to their ancestral Mahicannituck land. That both lands, diasporic and ancestral, are home to them.
How painfully do his stories of ancestral trauma echo to those of my own people, both driven out of homelands and exiled repeatedly over centuries by the greed and murder of imperial expansion. Given that my ancestors landed on the homelands of his ancestors more than a century later, how strange and bittersweet to be part of welcoming the Munsee Mohican people back here. As we drove along the Taconic Parkway, haltingly I told Shawn of my connection to these lands, pointing out creeks and wetlands connected to the waters of my childhood, and of the communities my Jewish ancestors created here. As he followed the passing landscape with his eyes, to some unasked question in my voice he replied “Every people needs a homeland”.
From a day of being in the presence of Shawn and the Shinnecock kelp farmers, I could begin to glimpse possibilities. That perhaps my people’s continuing dwelling here on these lands can somehow be part of the healing of the history that drove the near-total destruction of their peoples’ lands and cultures, and has mounted into a threat to all life forms through ecological and climate disruption. A glimpse of how to begin to join with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, through working with groups like Land Justice Futures and Alliance for a Viable Future, to build regionally-based coalitions for climate solutions, for land stewardship and return, following indigenous people’s leadership.
And with these indigenous teachings in this time of war in Israel/Palestine, I am also becoming aware of different understandings of belonging to homelands ancestral and exilic, of ways forward to sharing and coexisting on lands that are home to different peoples. As inheritors of colonialism, toward a process of land justice, toward what peace could be.
On this watershed, where I grew my relationship to life and to my own kinship community, I see that I too, am still coming home to here. And beginning to sense being part of a larger whole again in the work to transform systems of greed and domination - in ways that are so kindred to the aspirations and practices of my own people and Jewish communist tradition.
(1)A Native History of the Hudson Valley, Westchester Magazine, June 4, 2021
(2)Mohican Story for a Viable Future, Alliance for a Viable Future
With acknowledgement and appreciation to Shawn Stevens, Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, Land Justice Futures, and for support in the writing to Aurora Levins Morales