By Sunayana Prabhu
RED BANK – The history, legacy and challenges facing New Jersey’s indigenous population have been widely documented. In its latest installment of the Let’s Talk About Race series, the Red Bank Public Library invited leaders of the Ramapough Lenape nation – Michaeline Picaro and her husband, the Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann – for a first-person account of the challenges their community still faces.
Both Picaro and Mann participated in the Racism and the Original People of New Jersey talk, held virtually and in-person at the library May 31.
The couple, based in Sussex County, has been advocating environmental justice for native lands in New Jersey for decades.
The Ramapough Lenape Nation encompasses Passaic and Sussex counties in New Jersey, as well as Warwick and surrounding areas in New York. Many of the Turtle Clan’s members live in Ringwood today, on land that was twice declared a Superfund site due to toxic dumping in the 1960s that continues to challenge both the residents and their environment. (Congress established the Superfund program in 1980 to help clean up sites contaminated by hazardous waste from industrial sites.)
One of the country’s largest auto manufacturers at the time, Ford Motor Company moved its manufacturing plant into the 500-acre Ringwood mines site in Mahwah in 1956. In 1964, the company “started to dump toxic paint sludge from the automobile manufacturing plant” into the Ringwood mines and forests, where our long homes were,” Mann said, which contaminated the soil and groundwater. The toxic offcasts traveled through mine shafts “less than a mile from the Wanaque Reservoir,” Mann said, a water supply “that feeds one-third of the population of the state of New Jersey.”
“Our people started falling like flies,” said Mann.
The Ringwood mines were listed as Superfund site by the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection (USDEP) in 1983 and again in 2006. Superfund sites are declared by the federal government as some of the most toxic places in the country, but according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), the contamination from Ford’s auto plant has been so deep that years of combined remediation efforts from state and federal governments have failed.
In 2022, the NJDEP filed a lawsuit against Ford Motor Company to require the company acknowledge the damage done to the historic Native American community in Ringwood and to demand Ford fully remediate the area. However, the lawsuit documents state, “To this day, Ringwood Mines remains contaminated with hazardous substances and pollutants despite repeated and on-going remediation efforts.”
“There was a certain time when we actually had a funeral every single day of the week, Monday to Sunday,” Mann said about the human loss from Ford’s toxic dumping in the mine pits where Turtle Clan ancestors worked.
“What kind of community do you know in the United States that goes through something like that?” asked Mann.
The oppression of Native Americans has its roots in U.S. colonialism. “We became the study of eugenics,” Mann said, referring to the late 19th century pseudo-scientific doctrine by Francis Galton who advocated for “selective breeding” of British genes by sterilizing those he considered social misfits in order to improve the human race. Eugenics ultimately contributed to state-sponsored racial and ethnic discrimination, forced sterilization and genocide, Mann said, and the American eugenics movement became the model for Nazism and the Holocaust.
Mann told the attendees that in 1923, a consortium of eugenics enthusiasts “came up with 18 different ways to deal with the unwanted people at the Ramapo mountains.” The “No. 1” suggestion, which, according to Mann, was “written in black and white,” was through “a public gas chamber.”
While that did not come to fruition, sterilizations did.
Historian Jane Lawrence tracked medical procedures performed on Native American women throughout the 1960s and ’70s. According to her report, “a rash of forced sterilizations began in the 1960s. Even after legislation designed to protect women from forced sterilization was passed in 1974, the abusive sterilizations continued. Between 1970 and 1976 alone, between 25 and 50 percent of Native American women were sterilized.”
“Our kids were separated from our families,” Mann said. They were put in the “fictitious village” of Letchworth, a residential institution for the mentally and physically challenged established in 1911 in Rockland County, New York, with a compassionate vision that soon turned into a modern medical horror show.
“It was there to strip our indigenous ways and thoughts and looks out of us and our culture,” Mann said.
In her scholarly paper “The Little-Known History of Forced Sterilization of Native American Women,” Erin Blakemore writes about the tribes’ loss of political power due to their dwindling numbers. “The forced sterilization of Native American women is another page in the long book of abuse wrought upon Native peoples by the United States.”
Blakemore attributes that, in combination with the “forced assimilation of Native American children… in compulsory boarding schools” and the failure of social services to place Native American children in foster care with Native parents.
In 2019, Mann co-founded the Munsee Three Sisters medicinal farm with Picarno to create local jobs, as well as an associated nonprofit, the Ramapough Culture and Land Foundation, to bring food sovereignty back to his clan. “Nobody has come to help our people who are suffering for 54 years living in a federal Superfund site,” he said.
“Nobody. Not the federal government, not the town who hates us, not the county and not the state, at least not until recently.”
Mann said NYU Langone’s Division of Environmental Medicine has helped them secure a grant for five years to fund the farm which grows hemp “so that we can then raise money to hold people accountable for their actions.”
Mann cited pop culture references from books and films that continue to propagate racist images of Native Americans. He noted how a children’s book from 1926 calls Native Americans “a queer blend of mixed races which kept their type intact for more than a century by intermarriage and isolation.” Despite being written nearly 100 years ago, Mann said, these are “still the thoughts of many people.”
Mann said Native Americans are just entering their own civil rights movement but despite the atrocities, the community has survived and for that it must be “applauded,” Mann said.
“We are Ramapough and we are still here.”
The article originally appeared in the June 22 – 28, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
