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 ĐÇżŐÎŢĎŢ´ŤĂ˝ University

ĐÇżŐÎŢĎŢ´ŤĂ˝ University 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 .

Listen to the episode .

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.

You may also be interested in:

Community-based Learning Makes an Impact

Students Plant Seeds to Revive a Native American Language

Written by Sarah Ramirez

The field school will include a blend of traditional classroom learning, fieldwork, hands-on learning, and working as part of a research team.

Specific activities include:

• working with tribal members to create a digital document archive related to the Ringwood Superfund site located in the Ramapough Turtle Clan homeland
• identifying and recording features of Native cultural heritage which may include a cemetery clean up as well as documentation of the Lenape ceremonial stone landscape
• creating resources to support tribal language learning and revitalization
• working at the tribally operated Munsee Three Sisters farm to support of Ramapough food sovereignty

The field school will meet Tuesday-Friday 4 days/week for 4 weeks 8:30am – 4:30pm. Students are expected to commit to the project full time. We will meet on the MSU campus as well as other locations including the Munsee Three Sisters Farm in Newton, NJ and the Ringwood Public Library. Transportation and meals will be provided when we visit off-campus sites. Students accepted to the field school will receive a stipend to offset personal expenses.

Please complete the following form to apply:

Application deadline: Friday, March 8, 2024, 5:00pm
Questions? Contact the programs directors at nais@montclair.edu

Download the 2024 NAIS Field Summer School Flyer

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.

You may also like:

• Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day
• Community-Based Learning Makes an Impact

Please join us! Documentary screening followed by panel discussion with filmmaker and tribal leaders!

Film Description: In September 2020 the documentary crew filmed a talking circle of Ramapough elders, relations, and partners at the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm. The resulting documentary- The Meaning of the Seed – is structured along the layers of the landscape, chronologically working up from the ground to the overstory. The first section, SOIL, describes the history of contamination in Ringwood and the contaminated ground that many Native Americans live on or near. SEED recounts the struggles of the Ramapough and their cultural connections to the land. GROWTH chronicles the Ramapough’s cultural restoration program and efforts to work towards food sovereignty through their recently inaugurated Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newton, NJ. Finally, SUNLIGHT is a call to action, as the talking circle participants urge a younger generation to become involved with environmental justice movements.

The ancestral home of the Ramapough Lunaape (Lenape) Turtle Clan is Ringwood, New Jersey. The landscape includes former iron mines, Native American rock shelters, a forest in which people hunt and forage for food, a large drinking water reservoir, deep pockets of contaminated soil, streams that now flow with orange water, a stew of different chemical toxicants from the former Ford manufacturing plant, and the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site. People live in the Superfund site, just upstream from the Wanaque Reservoir, which provides drinking water to millions of New Jersey residents.

Co-sponsored by:
• Departments of Anthropology, History, Linguistics, and Religion
• The Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project
• The University Senate Land Acknowledgment Committee.

For further information please contact: Chris Matthews at matthewsc@montclair.edu

Tell us about your current research.

Right now I’m working on using immersive technologies to create interactive virtual reality experiences of religious rituals. Sponsored by a National Endowment of the Humanities grant, I hosted a workshop last year that brought together immersive media creators, digital humanists, and scholars from several disciplines to lay the groundwork for how to use 360-degree filming and 3D sound technology to capture live rituals. Incorporating interviews with scholars, religious professionals, and practitioners alongside informational overlays and 3D renderings of ritual implements, the project promises to bring users into spaces while providing reliable information about the procedure, symbolism, and meanings.

Recently I launched a partnership with the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago, and together we intend to create a set of resources over the next 2 years. In addition, I’m working with ĐÇżŐÎŢĎŢ´ŤĂ˝ faculty colleagues in the School of Communication and Media to outline pilot experiential learning classes where students would take the lead in the research, planning, and recording of these experiences, including developing skills in highly prized digital media skills.

Talk about the importance of your work from your perspective as a humanities scholar or social scientist – Why does it matter for society? What makes it valuable to our students?

Religion is an issue of perpetual interest, but too often students don’t know what we do in the study of religion. Allowing students to witness ‘first-hand’ the religious practices of others can help radically increase intercultural understanding and empathy. Recording rituals would require partnering with local religious communities and collaboratively determining how to represent their practices in a balance between insider knowledge and outsider analysis. Using VR in humanities classrooms has been shown to increase retention, advance learning outcomes, and engage students in deep and long-lasting ways. Virtually entering into the religious spaces that are unfamiliar–as well as getting perspectives on spaces that are familiar–can advance our appreciation of diversity and demystify practices students have never encountered. If all of this can be delivered in classes where students take the lead in production from start to finish, it can be an educational opportunity with an impact that extends far beyond the university.

What makes your approach to teaching and research unique or innovative?

First, by integrating new media into teaching about religion we can harness new technologies towards activating students’ interest and imagination. By integrating interactivity into these resources, students are given agency over learning experiences that transport them to the spaces wherein religious life takes place. Second, the ability to approximate presence at sacred spaces without leaving the campus can capitalize on the benefits from popular “site visit” activities with much greater flexibility and fewer resources. Lastly, guiding students through the creation stages of VR experiences will not only give them skills highly attractive for numerous careers, but also show them what is possible in this new world of immersive media.

Do you have a favorite course to teach?

I routinely teach a course a few times a semester and I absolutely love it. Exposing students to the logics of religion and the varieties of practice is extremely rewarding. We spend time looking at how understanding religion and religious behavior is a necessity in modern law, politics, and society at large. The course offers an opportunity not merely to introduce new information, but to change ways of thinking about a subject as ubiquitous as it is misunderstood.

What’s your favorite thing about ĐÇżŐÎŢĎŢ´ŤĂ˝?

Without a doubt the people. The students are kind and thoughtful, the members of my department are phenomenal people and scholars, and CHSS and Montclair as a whole I’ve found to be a really collaborative place.

What are your hopes/goals for your students as they become the next generation of professional and engaged citizens of the world?

Open-mindedness paired with an ability to critically reflect upon information is something our world desperately needs. I hope our students take the lead in promoting diversity and equality in whatever field they enter, and developing civic competencies that will enhance our national and global belonging.

Program Benefits

• High-achieving ĐÇżŐÎŢĎŢ´ŤĂ˝ students are able to complete a Bachelor’s and MBA degree in five years
• Students from a variety of undergraduate disciplines gain valuable business and professional knowledge, skills and experiences that enhance their employability and career options post graduation.
• Students are able to take advantage of a more time- and cost-effective option for getting an MBA degree by taking “swing” graduate courses that satisfy both their undergraduate and graduate degrees at the undergraduate tuition rate.

The following CHSS undergraduate programs are approved for participation in the 4 +1 program:

• BA Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
• (with concentrations in Arabic, French, German, and Italian). NOTE: the combined BA/MBA program option is not applicable to the BA in Language Business and Culture with a concentration in Spanish.
• BA Philosophy

Interested in Pursuing the 4+1 Bachelor’s / MBA Program? Follow these simple steps:

Contact Us

April Sime
MBA Office
973-655-4306
gradbusiness@montclair.edu

On the first day of class, Clatterbuck shared his experiences with the students and proposed scrapping the syllabus, taking a risk and partnering with the Turtle Clan in their fight for justice.

“The title of our course was ‘Indigenous Voices Today,’”said Clatterbuck. “Why study Native communities in Arizona, South Dakota, or California when we could work alongside a Native community right here in New Jersey?”

With the students up for the challenge, Clatterbuck and his students began planning the next sixteen weeks of their course which turned into a justice-oriented, community-based learning experience.

Warning Signs at the Ringwood Superfund Site, Home of the Turtle Clan Ramapough

History of Environmental Injustice

The Turtle Clan’s core community of the Ramapough Lenape Nation has lived in Ringwood, NJ, and the mountains of Passaic and Sussex Counties in New Jersey, and Warwick and surrounding areas in New York for centuries. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Ford Motor company purchased the land that the Tribe called home, and used the local Ringwood Mines as a disposal for paint sludge and other toxic waste materials. The resulting contaminants lead to the entire community being named a Superfund Site.

To this day, the Tribe continues to fight for proper cleanup of the toxic site which has put the community’s land, water, air and public health at risk for decades.

“This is a classic case of environmental racism, unfolding just 20 miles from campus. It’s also a reminder that the genocidal & land-grabbing legacy of US settler colonialism toward Indigenous people is not a relic of the past. It continues today,” says Clatterbuck.

Work Begins

Through conversations with Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann, Clatterbuck’s students organized into two teams, both with goals and objectives aimed in direct response to the Superfund Site.

A student Clinic Team was developed to explore the steps the Tribe could take to form an Indigenous Wellness Clinic to address the serious health concerns of the community while also promoting Munsee (a subtribe of the Lenape) traditional knowledge, culture, language, and spirituality.

After hearing that Chief Mann was interested in language recovery for the Ramapough, Anna Stalenyj, a Family Science & Human Development major, set a goal to create a language revitalization binder for Chief Mann. Through online research, attendance at campus language revitalization workshops and coordination of a virtual class workshop with an Apsáalooke language expert with rich experiences of work among the Crow Tribe in Montana, Stalenyj was able to provide Mann with a wide range of resources to continue the work of restoring the Turtle Clan’s language, culture and customs.

The other half of Clatterbuck’s students formed the Archive Team, dedicated to laying the groundwork for a digital archive of materials to aid the Tribe in their ongoing legal battle against both Ford and the federal government for a livable future. One of the prime issues the Ramapough were having with their progress in their legal battle was organizing their files and accounting for all relevant documents.

“My role in the archive team was to create what essentially became an annotated bibliography for a series of documents the tribe was having difficulty organizing,” said Amanda Quintana, an English major and Religion minor. “Our group went through the “motherload”, a large compilation of documents, and added information that allowed for easy navigation as well as a brief understanding of the contents in each file.”

Students sort through and scan tribe documents to create a digital archive.

Stepping out of the model of the traditional classroom experience, like Clatterbuck’s students have, puts the student in the driver’s seat as co-creators, working together to solve real-world challenges. Through field trips, volunteering with the Ramapough community, meeting with tribal leaders, and holding zoom sessions with experts in Native cultural ways, the students were able to see and experience the actual stakes at play for the Turtle Clan Community.

“One thing I discovered about myself during this experience and semester was my love for this unconventional method of learning,” says Stalenyj. “I believe that education is important, but being able to get an education by assisting those in need and actively working to address current injustices is far more important.”

In a class with students hailing from different academic majors, a break from the traditional classroom experience allowed students to find a project within their assigned teams that they could relate to their own educational experience while still contributing to the larger team goals.

Yazemin Yilmaz, a Film and Television major, captured the course experience in . Through videos and photos from course field trips and on-camera interviews, the students discuss the course projects they worked on and the experiences of the hands-on learning approach.

“No matter the movement, whether or not you are affected by the injustices, more voices travel further than few,” said Yilmaz. “The underlying goal [of the documentary] is ensuring that this class, or similar ones, continue to exist. We need as many hands to support our Native community.”

Quintana highlights the conversations with Chief Mann, as the most impactful parts of the course, noting that the passion and frustration behind his words was especially moving.

“It is difficult to become completely invested in an issue when it is limited to an academic setting, however, by learning about Indigenous experiences directly from tribe members and taking part in their tribe’s activities, our class was able to strongly connect to the importance of their problems,” says Quintana. “Interacting directly with the Clan and learning about their experiences allowed us to develop a strong “why” when it comes to creating real change.“

The impact of the course is tangible as Clatterbuck notes that several students have kept in touch to see how they can remain involved in the projects with the Turtle Clan, even though classes ended in early May.

Looking to the Future

As a scholar of religion, Clatterbuck says his goal is always to help students understand the deadly serious consequences of how unexplored assumptions and core beliefs profoundly shape decisions and behaviors, both individually and collectively.

“I personally believe that community-engaged, justice-oriented, problem-based classes like ‘Indigenous Voices Today’ might be the best response we have to the perennial question: why study the Humanities? At their core, the Humanities challenge us to ask hard questions about the kind of society we’re creating together, and what concrete steps we can take to shape a more just and compassionate world.”

Clatterbuck intends to continue the project with future students in this course and says the work is really just beginning. One of the projects the class completed in the spring was acquiring a large, multi-purpose, military field tent for the Turtle Clan, which was donated and installed at the Tribe’s Munsee Three Sisters Organic Farm in Newton, NJ.

“We want this tent to serve as a community-based learning space for MSU classes to volunteer at the farm, build relationships with the Ramapough, and learn about organic farming, food justice, contemporary Native lifeways, and Indigenous sovereignty.”

ĐÇżŐÎŢĎŢ´ŤĂ˝â€™s newly established Native American & Indigenous Studies Minor is already exploring possibilities to make use of the outdoor space. This Fall, Clatterbuck’s students in “Native American Religions” () will visit the farm to discuss the role of traditional medicinals in Ramapough spirituality and learn from tribal elders about the sacredness of the natural world.

You may also like:

• CHSS Faculty Instrumental in Land Acknowledgement Agreement