With its commitment to Indigenous rights, racial justice, decolonization and eco-justice, the NAIS program emphasizes the priorities of New Jersey’s state-recognized Native American tribes – the Ramapough Lunaape, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and Powhatan Renape nations – which include environmental justice, political recognition, cultural heritage and language revitalization.

The NJCIJ will be a center for communication, fundraising, events and gatherings that highlight the unique questions facing Montclair’s Indigenous students and New Jersey’s tribal communities. It will coordinate the University’s work to change public narratives, increase Indigenous student enrollment and pursue justice-oriented action on issues affecting Native people in the state.

“The NJCIJ will give focus to the varied work Montclair faculty and students are doing in partnership with New Jersey’s tribal communities,” says Anthropology Department Chair Chris Matthews, a co-director of NAIS and co-Principal Investigator of the grant. “[It] will be the first and only university-based project in New Jersey that aims to transform public understanding of Native people and to do so in partnership with Indigenous communities across the state.”

About the New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice and NAIS Program Grant

In addition to Matthews, the co-Principal Investigators of the grant include Religion Professor Mark Clatterbuck, Anthropology Professor Maisa Taha and Educational Foundations Professor Lisa Lynn Brooks, all fellow co-directors of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program.

The grant funds will be used to establish the New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice and achieve the following goals:

• Deepen the impact of the NAIS program by providing additional resources and support for interdisciplinary collaboration and research.
• Establish a digital repository of tribal knowledge and resources to ensure their preservation and availability to tribal members, and to Montclair faculty and students.
• Hire a NJCIJ director who will promote increased engagement with the New Jersey tribes and with Indigenous issues, while also helping to recruit and mentor a growing number of New Jersey tribal members at the University.

Native American and Indigenous Initiatives at ����vlog

����vlog is committed to increasing the awareness and knowledge of New Jersey’s Native American tribes and the issues they face.

As demonstrated by the adoption of a Land Acknowledgement Statement in 2022 that recognizes that the University occupies territory historically known as Lenapehoking, the homeland of all Lenape people, the University is committed to social justice and to offering learning opportunities and promoting Native American culture and history.

In addition to the Native American and Indigenous Studies minor, some of these initiatives include:

• Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day
• Annual NAIS Summer Field School
• Lectures and Panels

“The Mellon Foundation grant will significantly increase Montclair’s ability to fulfill our commitment to addressing the historical legacies of Indigenous dispossession and dismantling practices of erasure that persist today, as stated in our University Land Acknowledgement,” says Clatterbuck. “The new center, in tandem with our Native American and Indigenous Studies program, is focused on Indigenizing New Jersey while decolonizing educational, social and political legacies that continue to overlook Native people and exploit Native lands.”

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at .

The four week program had a full roster of thirteen students along with one postdoctoral fellow and three TAs who were returning past participants, now helping run the trip.

According to Dr. Clatterbuck, professor and co-director of the program, students have a lot of unlearning to do before they can learn Indigenous history. Students discussed the failures of the school systems in not teaching them about Native history or the fact that tribes still exist and live all over New Jersey. In order to begin deconstructing these misconceptions, The Native American and Indigenous Studies program prioritizes getting students in direct contact with Indigenous elders and tribes.

The best way for Native history to be taught is “on their land, in their voices,” says Dr. Clatterbuck.

Week one was spent with the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lunaape Tribe in Ringwood. Under the guidance of Ramapough elder Wayne Mann, students learned about Ford Motor Company’s dumping of toxic waste onto the land in the 1960s and 1970s. Having never been given a proper clean up, the land has since been declared a federal superfund site.

The Turtle Clan taught students about their efforts to demand resources and support for a clean up project and students were able to help them create a digital repository documenting Ford’s contamination of Ringwood.

Week two was spent in Bridgeton with the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribe on the Nanticoke tribal lands and camping out at Cohanzick Sanctuary. Students were able to see how the Cohanzick Sanctuary spreads Indigenous wisdom on how people can reconnect with nature.

Member of the Stockbridge Band of Mohegans from Wisconsin, Wanonah Spencer, and Ramapough youth organization, The Tomorrow People, led talking circles and provided guidance on insightful discussions on how to quiet one’s “human.” The Tomorrow People, formed by Wayne Mann, focuses on developing solutions for problems and trauma derived from the contamination of Ringwood.

The tribe emphasized that environmental justice is necessary now more than ever as we face a new peak in the climate crisis. They reminded students that their ancestors handled the planet with great care and if they want to pass along a healthy world to the next generation, land must be restored and taken care of.

As students were shown how to develop their personal relationships with the environment, the tribe encouraged them to do the same with one another, showing how both relationships go hand-in-hand.

For senior Nawal Rai, a Geography, Environmental, and Urban Studies major, camping at Cohanzick Sanctuary was unpredictably illuminating.

“It was honestly very healing for me,” he says. “We went on a walk at midnight through the woods and stargazed…The elders helped us connect with the site and showed us how to open up with one another, and it brought me closer to so many people.”

This level of engagement is exactly how Rai prefers to learn: “We’re not just learning about the history of Indigenous people from an instructor in a classroom. It’s beyond that. Everything we learned came from people who have experienced the violence of our state, and the stories about their own bloodline finally came from them instead of a textbook.”

The third week was spent with Chief Dwaine Perry, Principal Chief of the Ramapough Mountain Indians, Vincent Morgan, Executive Director of Ramapough Mountain Indians, and Owl, attorney for the Ramapough, bringing the students to a historic Ramapough burial ground. What was once a place built to honor their deceased loved ones has since become another dumping ground for the public.

Students learned about the tribe’s preservation efforts whilst working with Ramapough elders and caretakers of the grounds to clean up the property and study county and state maps. They used the information they gathered and GIS mapping to mark graves and outline the borders of the area to more thoroughly document its existence.

Students utilizing GIS mapping

The fourth and final week of the program brought students to work at Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newton. The 14-acre organic farm is run by Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann, Michaeline Picaro Mann, and the farm’s manager, Lenny Welch (Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians), as a direct response to the contamination of the Ringwood Community.

The farm uses traditional Indigenous practices while harvesting crops and students were shown these customs while weeding, mulching, harvesting, and learning about Indigenous cultivation and the importance of food sovereignty.

Students washing fresh picked strawberries at Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm.

Beyond providing safe food for tribes that cannot harvest on their own lands, the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm has also been a home for the revitalization of the Munsee language. Students learned about how language can be recovered and also decorated signs to be placed all over the property with crops labeled in Munsee with their English translations.

“I think one of the biggest parts of the unlearning process for me was that there still are communities around working to revitalize their language and culture, and I needed to understand that movement, why it is important to them, and why it is important for the world to preserve language and culture,” Nawal Rai says.

Students painting signage in Munsee

The Field School’s program ended with a heart-warming celebration when the students were invited to participate in the annual Nanticoke Powwow at the Salem County Fairgrounds. Each year, the Nanticoke Powwow hosts two days of cultural celebration filled with traditional music, dance, food, and craftsmanship, and students had the unique opportunity to help those running the festivities.

While the history of New Jersey’s treatment of Indigenous tribes tells a painful story of the intended erasure of Native people, the Field School’s summer program highlights their resilience and survival.

Many of us often succumb to the fallacy that Indigenous tribes live far away, either in distance or in time, but the Native American and Indigenous Studies program dismantles the mentality that refers to Native people in the past tense, and the interpersonal relationships and experiences that students gained during the 2024 summer season is only one way they do it.

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interviewed , Professor of Religion and co-director of Native American and Indigenous Studies, to delve into the controversy and offer insights into the challenges surrounding understanding and respecting Indigenous practices.

“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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• Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day
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����vlog celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day on October 10 with a special on-campus event that not only highlighted thriving Indigenous cultures, but also showcased the institution’s commitment to creating hands-on learning opportunities that make a difference in the world.

Montclair welcomed the Red Blanket Singers of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribe of New Jersey for a special performance as part of the early evening event, which also served as the formal unveiling of the University’s new Native American and Indigenous Studies minor and Montclair’s formal Land Acknowledgement.

Students from Montclair’s new course “Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies” read the Land Acknowledgement to begin the event, which also featured remarks from President Jonathan Koppell and recent alumna and Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape member Brianna Dagostino ’21.

Brianna Dagostino ’21 (Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape) offers reflections on the significance of Indigenous Peoples Day.

Department of Anthropology Chairperson and Native American and Indigenous Studies Co-Director Christopher Matthews welcomes the attendees.

Urie Ridgeway, emcee for the Red Blanket Singers.

Montclair President Jonathan Koppell addresses the audience.

Members of the Red Blanket Singers participate in traditional tribal dances.

To see more photos, go to the . Photos by University Photographer Mike Peters.