Tori Sutera, AJ Humenik, Emily Papagiannis, and Lucas Gonzalez were awarded grants to participate in the 2024 Native American and Indigenous Studies field school run by MSU’s NAIS program. Natalia Orlovski used her Bigel award to be part of a Global Treks and Adventures internship program in Iceland where she researched and visited several amazing cultural and heritage sites. Ellie Paschalis was able to travel to the Basque country in Spain to participate in the Aditu Archaeological Field School which is focused on the recovery and study of human remains from a medieval-period ossuary. Khara Brown also traveled for an archeological field at James Madison’s Montpelier, the planation of America’s fourth president. Khara’s program studied and excavated at the site to better understand the enslaved community who labored and sustain the plantation in the 19th century.

The student reports were outstanding and clearly demonstrated the special opportunities available to Anthropology students thanks to their access to the Bigel scholarship fund.

In this engaged course, students are working in partnership with the and to create and shape a collaborative research project. Students will gain valuable hands-on skills in urban analysis, will tap into local nonprofit, business, and government for employment opportunities, and use the skills and insight they have learned to wrestle with crucial urban issues like public health, inequality and infrastructure, transit-oriented development, public health and gentrification.

The University of Orange is a free school of restoration urbanism that has an extensive history of allowing residents of Orange, a community that has experienced decades of displacement, disinvestment, and destruction, a vehicle to reclaim their city’s past and shape its future. On September 20, the class took a visit to Orange, where they were given a tour of the site they will study this semester by Molly Rose Kaufman, from the University of Orange.

Students joined Molly Rose Kaufman, from the University of Orange, for a walking tour of the neighborhood surrounding the Orange Train Station that they will be researching this semester.

Still, she was surprised by what she saw in Newark’s Ironbound and the proximity of polluters to children playing in the streets. “It was startling to me because of the health risks,” she says.

The industrial neighborhood – a concentration of factories and warehouses, a power plant, chemical refineries, the state’s largest garbage incinerator and a Superfund site – has long been the focus of protests and activists dedicated to uplifting this overburdened community of color, continuing a fight for clean air and land.

“The stories we heard of the activism – what’s been, what’s in the works, what’s going on – that aspect gave us hope,” adds Leanna Sanchez ’22, who joined Polius and other students in a ����vlog Anthropology class for a tour around the Ironbound.

A plane flies over the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, where industrial facilities dominate the landscape. Down Bottom Farms, a community garden built on raised beds sits on top of an industrial brownfield and offers a hopeful vision of a healthy future.

Despite all odds, change has happened. Led by the Ironbound Community Corporation, environmental justice and social service programs, including early childhood and after-school enrichment, empower the low-income community – with its garden, Down Bottom Farms, proof that transformative change is possible.

“Seeing the garden was definitely a manifestation of the work absolutely being done,” says Sanchez, a December graduate with a degree in Anthropology now working toward a master’s degree in Sustainability Science.

Christian Rodriguez, urban agriculture manager at Down Bottom Farms, leads Montclair students on a tour of the garden. Among the group, graduate students Leanna Sanchez ’22, second from left, and Krishna Polius, third from left, are part of the Anthropology class that explores solutions to building sustainable communities.

“Change doesn’t happen overnight, but it can happen,” says Anthropology Professor Katherine McCaffrey. She teaches “Building Sustainable Communities,” a class that explores local and regional strategies being used to improve communities disrupted by climate change. She also draws on the strength of University partnerships, inviting leaders in the sustainability movement to class and collaborating with the University’s PSEG Institute for Sustainability Studies on special projects.

“We are always talking in class about how to identify the vulnerable,” says Gianna D’Aloia ’21. “What can we do for them? How can we bring them together so they’re involved in decisions that are being made, that impact them.”

This semester, the three graduate students, D’Aloia, Sanchez and Polius, are collaborating with the Township of Verona, identifying with mapping software heat islands and designing ways to lessen the higher temperatures found in various parts of the town. The work is being done in partnership with Verona’s Green Team and Sustainable New Jersey, with findings to be presented to the township’s Planning Board this spring.

“We’ll be making suggestions for green infrastructure, plantings, rain gardens and bio soils and different kinds of infrastructure that will help reduce heat and manage stormwater,” Sanchez says. “We’re trying to bring ideas that are going to mesh with the community, are inexpensive and aesthetically pleasing.”

The students are also coming to terms that such work proceeds more slowly than hoped. “They’re learning that sometimes in order to be effective, you need a different pace. It’s not a matter of checking boxes and meeting deadlines. You need to take the time to talk and meet with people,” McCaffrey says.

Richard Steiner-Otoo, a junior majoring in Geographic, Environmental and Urban Studies, turns a compost pile at Down Bottom Farms. The site has evolved from an abandoned and contaminated freight rail yard into a community asset that promotes sustainability and food justice.

For many of the Montclair students, the Ironbound tour was an eye opener. “If you care about your kids or your grandkids, then you have to care about the resources in terms of social, environmental, political and economic matters. You have to educate yourself and find something you care about,” says D’Aloia, who graduated with a degree in Philosophy and will earn her master’s in Sustainability Science this May.

“Start talking about it, start making people worried about it,” she says.

Photo Gallery

The Superfund site of the Diamond Alkali plant, which gained notoriety for producing the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War and polluting Newark with the highest concentration of dioxin in the United States. In the 1980s, residents protested that the company was poisoning the river with dioxins, which then attached to truck wheels, and tracked dioxin throughout the Ironbound. A toxic hot spot was the community pool which has remained closed ever since.

Winter Sims, the farm’s program coordinator, gesturing thumbs up to Montclair students during a tour with farm manager Christian Rodriguez at Down Bottom Farms.

Seedlings ready for the growing season at Down Bottoms Farm. The garden encourages healthy initiatives and hosts a Farmer’s Market every Saturday from mid-May through the end of October, providing access to fresh, locally grown produce to the residents of the Ironbound.

JV Valladolid, center, leads the tour for the Ironbound Community Corporation. The tour was an opportunity for the Montclair students to learn about the environmental challenges facing the Ironbound and the movement over five decades for environmental justice.

Story by Staff Writer Marilyn Joyce Lehren. Photos by University Photographer Mike Peters and John J. LaRosa.

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“It’s definitely a great place to start, but hopefully it’s not where we stop,” says Farrah Fornarotto, a junior majoring in Anthropology, with minors in Archaeology and the new Native American and Indigenous Studies. “There’s a lot to tackle.”

The challenges date back decades. Munsee Three Sisters Farm provides traditional food for the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lunaape (Lenape) Nation, a tribe that can no longer safely farm its own land in Upper Ringwood, New Jersey. Environmental and health issues caused by industrial dumping have led to a generational decline in the Turtle Clan members’ ability to practice their culture, including the Munsee language, which is at risk of becoming as dormant as the winter fields.

An intensive, field-based partnership with the Turtle Clan Ramapough includes work at the Munsee Three Sisters Farm, where Montclair students and professors are helping the tribe’s Indigenous food sovereignty and language revitalization efforts.

A key aspect of Montclair’s contributions are organizing the tribe’s records and documents related to the industrial dumping on ancestral land. Students are at work to help gather the scientific evidence documented at the Superfund site, the health impact and oral histories from eyewitnesses, and with University resources, creating a single, digitally accessible repository for future researchers and the tribal members who continue to fight for proper cleanup of the land.

More than 300 pages of newspaper articles detailing the dumping of toxic paint sludge from a Ford Motor Co. factory have been indexed by students. “My students are going through and creating a table of contents identifying the names [of key players], the toxic chemicals listed in reports, physical sites that are listed, agencies that are listed, and creating a searchable tool for that whole collection of news articles,” says Mark Clatterbuck, associate professor of Religion and co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program.

Montclair students taking part in the class projects say they share a commitment for helping Indigenous communities. Jala Best, a senior Psychology major, says her drive comes from her experiences as an Afro-Indigenous woman.

“Oftentimes the issues of Native communities are ignored or Native people are spoken about in the past tense, like we are not still living, breathing, surviving and fighting for justice …. You can’t even conceptualize that there are atrocities happening today because you believe that it’s a thing of the past,” Best says.

Mark Clatterbuck, right, oversees the garden signage with students Camille Howard, Julia Rodano and Farrah Fornarotto. “It’s the small things that build up, and eventually over time, the Turtle Clan’s language will be more visible to them and also to the public,” Fornarotto says.

Montclair has initiated a field-based partnership with Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation. The University support includes students working directly with the tribe on food sovereignty, the language revitalization effort and ongoing environmental concerns as part of Montclair’s new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

“The issues and the challenges of the Turtle Clan, they’re huge, they’re varied and there’s no shortage of them,” says Clatterbuck.

The program is closely tied to the University’s Land Acknowledgement Statement. Clatterbuck, along with History Professor Elspeth Martini and Anthropology Professor Chris Matthews consulted with New Jersey’s three state-recognized tribal nations – the Ramapough Lenape, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and Powhatan Renape – in drafting the statement, and also considered how it could represent a commitment from Montclair to working with and for their communities.

“It’s not just about making some sort of historical reference. It’s really about saying, ‘What is our responsibility to those communities?’” Clatterbuck says.

Mark Clatterbuck, associate professor of Religion and co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, constructs signage as part of the field work helping promote the preservation of Native American land and culture.

The program is intentionally community-engaged, hands-on and focused on problem-solving, including finding creative ways to support community-driven language revitalization and environmental recovery. “The Ramapough understand that part of their healing and survival is really dependent on recovering key aspects of their cultural ways,” Clatterbuck says. “Language is on par with restoring foodways and their access to clean water, land and air.”

Munsee language expert, Nikole Pecore, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Nation in Wisconsin, has guided Montclair students studying Linguistic Anthropology in building a digital repository of instructional materials that will be used to train new Munsee teachers and support community learners.

“We’re looking at language as a key to culture, to bringing back Munsee speaking cultures, as well as other Lenape languages belonging to original peoples in the state of New Jersey,” says Associate Anthropology Professor Maisa Taha.

Work on the farm also includes students preparing the fields and helping deliver the organic, healthy, medicinal healing crops to the community. “It’s doing the nitty-gritty work with local communities and following their lead,” Clatterbuck says.

Meryem Teke, a senior Religion major, paints a garden sign at the Munsee Three Sisters Farm. The work is among the creative ways Montclair is supporting the Turtle Clan’s language revitalization and environmental recovery.

“It might be challenging to figure out how all of these different pieces fit together. But the fact of the matter is they are all intimately connected,” Taha says. “You can’t have language without culture. You can’t have culture without tribal sovereignty. You can’t have tribal sovereignty without environmental justice. What we’re bringing to our students and frankly, to ourselves as well, is this huge opportunity to work with our tribal partners in trying to understand those connections and come up with reasonable, impactful solutions that will serve them for years to come.”

Clatterbuck adds, “We’re all passionate about this on a personal level, and we see this as a matter of justice and addressing – you hear the buzzword ‘decolonization’ thrown around a lot – but as far as I’m concerned, this is what that work looks like. It’s messy, and it’s trial and error, and we’re figuring all this out as we go. But that is the work.”

Photo Gallery

Montclair’s new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies is focusing on issues of indigenous sovereignty, cultural revitalization, environmental justice and language reclamation. Some of the field work is happening at the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newtown, New Jersey.

Montclair students have created signage for the Three Sisters Farm in the Munsee language. The illustrations will help tribal members as well as visitors to the farm visually connect the pictures and actual plants with the Munsee word. Efforts are also underway to create audio files so that learners can hear those words when accessed by QR codes added to the signs.

A rooster at Munsee Three Sisters Farm.

Story by Staff Writer Marilyn Joyce Lehren. Photos by John J. LaRosa.

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These students included junior Farrah Fornarotto, senior David Villa, and recent graduate Will Williams. Their papers, along with others by Prof Chris Matthews and Sasha Thompson (a student at Hunter College) focused on various aspects of the story of the historic African American Dunkerhook community who lived in Paramus, NJ during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Dr. Matthews has been a project co-coordinator of the Dunkerhook project since 2019. This project led an archaeological field school in Summer 2021 and a lab-based research experience in Summer 2022, MSU students formed the core of the research teams during both summer research initiatives.

The Dunkerhook community was founded by formerly enslaved individuals in the 1830s. The community grew to be a place where African American people and culture thrived for decades. The Dunkerhook Archaeological Survey aims to collect and interpret the history of this community through research in local archives as well as excavations. To this end, the students presented papers on historic maps and censuses, historic fruit jars used for home canning, and household ceramics reflecting unique cultural expressions.

The research reports prepared by the students will be compiled into a detailed technical report documenting the various threads of research undertaken to bring the story of the Dunkerhook community to light.

Family names analyzed in the paper, such as the Terhunes, Zabriskies, and Hoppers, maintained close intragroup business and family connections. One theory proposed by Williams suggests that enslaved individuals’ labor contributed to the families’ social and economic position by providing seasonal or temporary forced labor when community members required it. The white families’ mutual familiarity with the enslaved persons produced a surveillance network whose power model has similarities to the panopticon carceral system devised by Jeremy Bentham. The affective response to this power structure is possibly one factor limiting where emancipated African Americans established their homes.

Will Wiliams at the Dunkerhook site

The timing of the construction of two Jersey Dutch buildings along Dunkerhook Road – – and the building of a new Dutch community church in Paramus coincides with a temporary influx of enslaved labor exploited by the Zabriskie family, which is recorded in church documents. The article further speculates that the enslaved were not unskilled, and there is the possibility that some labor was used in community building projects. This perspective provides an alternate view of how enslaved persons were perceived and their roles in the early days of the American republic.

The article was published in the peer-reviewed journal, New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and can be downloaded .

Williams is currently an Archaeology Ph.D. student (2029) at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The African American Dunkerhook community was founded in the early 1800s by formerly enslaved men and women and remained in place until the early 20th century. At its peak the community consisted of six households consisting of more than 40 individuals. They also established an AME Zion church. Men worked on surrounding farms as laborers as well as drivers and coachmen for wealthier whites. Women were often laundresses, though Catherine Bennett’s obituary in 1911 noted that she was “a midwife who assisted at least 650 births for both black and white families … She read widely and was knowledgeable of not only medicine, but of agriculture, horticulture, and politics.”

Students excavated test pits and recovered thousands of artifacts. Exciting finds included pottery shards, animal bones, medicine bottles, marbles, slate pencils, brass buttons, horseshoes, a cow bell, a nursing bottle, an inkwell, a lock, and more than twenty small processed cheese containers that were likely repurposed to store something—perhaps medicine or baby food. These materials are currently being analyzed in the lab of the Center for Heritage and Archaeological Studies at Montclair State.

Students also did an initial survey of sections of the Dunkerhook Area of Saddle River Park. Artifacts recovered from these tests indicate that Native Americans occupied this area during what archaeologists call the Archaic era about 2000 years ago. Consultation with members of the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape nation, whose ancestral land includes the Paramus area, has led to new relationships and collaborations.

Field school students and staff were invited to visit with Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann and Clan Mother Micheline Picaro to learn more about their history and struggle to preserve their heritage. Documenting Ceremonial Stone Landscapes has become a new focus for the team.

Small patent medicine bottle from the turn of the 20th century photographed in situ.

MSU archaeological field school students and staff in front of a large stone feature that is part of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation’s Ceremonial Stone Landscape. Turtle Clan mother Micheline Picaro is second from the right.

MSU archaeology students Dangelis Soto and Will Williams recording a unit profile at the Dunkerhook site.

Mid-19th-century ceramic ink well recovered at Dunkerhook.

End of the field school group photo. Everyone is wearing the Dunkerhook Field School t-shirt designed by the students.

The t-shirt design for the Dunkerhook field school noting the theme of exposing erasure.

A collaborative team, including Christopher N. Matthews, professor in the Department of Anthropology, has been working to change that.

A historical and archaeological study of the long-standing community in the Bethel-Christian Avenue-Laurel Hill Historic District began in 2009. This summer, Matthews, along with two students, Alexis Alemy and Sophia Hudzik, released an interactive map as a dynamic and informative way to present their discoveries.

�䲹���������, this Digital Humanities initiative is produced on the ArcGIS ‘‘ platform created by ESRI. It features photos, historical documents, details on excavation finds, coordinates embedded in a Google Earth map, and more.

“Story maps can be of vital use to archaeologists and other researchers by providing a low cost, relatively easy way to make scholarship available to the public in an accessible and exciting online format,” wrote Alemy and Hudzik in an article about the project on the���ɱ�������ٱ�.

The trio also wrote about the project for  published on the Society for American Archaeology’s �������ٱ�.

A Long Time Coming

Called “A Long Time Coming,” the study of the Bethel-Christian Avenue-Laurel Hill Historic District is a collaborative effort supported by community members, researchers and students associated with Higher Ground Intercultural and Heritage Association, Inc., ����vlog, Hofstra University, and Education Works. Key leadership includes Robert Lewis (Higher Ground), Chris Matthews, and Judith Burgess (Education Works).

As part of the study, Matthews led excavations at two sites: Jacob and Hannah Hart home and the Silas Tobias home. The well-preserved Hart site was excavated in 2011 and 2015. It yielded finds including a quartz lithic tool, a wide range of buttons, a straight pin, a thimble, and a sewing oil bottle fragment. Descendants of the homeowners still live in and around Setauket.

Excavation of the Tobias site in 2015 yielded more than 15,000 artifacts including 500 quartz tools and flakes from stone tool making and use as well as everyday materials such as shards from dishes, bottles, and windows, as well as personal items like clay tobacco pipe fragments and shoe parts.

Researchers also gathered materials from historical archives and conducting oral histories.

Project background: Past and future
The ground-breaking project has been written about multiple times in the press with articles including: “,,, and.

As noted above, the Montclair students wrote about the Counter-Map project for two online publications. They also submitted the project to a storymap contest. Matthews has published findings from the excavations in scholarly publications and is working on a book-length manuscript.

The Higher Ground Intercultural and Heritage Association is working with Historical New York Research Associates to create a detailed Cultural Resource Survey documenting the significance of dozens of local neighborhood landmarks. It’s to support a pending application to add the Bethel-Christian Avenue sites to the National Register for Historic Places.

Montclair anthropology students joined , associate professor of Anthropology, on the High Line Park in New York City April 30. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Brash is currently engaged in a two-year ethnographic research project examining the meaning and function of public space in the postindustrial city.

The enormously popular park, built on an abandoned railway trestle on the Westside of Manhattan, attracts tourists from across the globe, as well as workers and residents from nearby areas, joggers and students socializing after school. The High Line has been lauded as a model of contemporary urban public space, yet also criticized as an expression of the hyper-gentrification of New York City.

Dr. Brash, joined by two anthropology undergraduate research assistants, Alexis Alemy and Jennifer Rogers, is investigating who uses the park and for what purposes. Dr. Brash’s research team is exploring how public spaces such as the High Line represent the physical expression of democratic citizenship, a place where people gather, converse, and develop new ideas. Through understanding how people use and experience the High Line, Dr. Brash’s research will deepen an understanding of contemporary urban citizenship and politics.

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