Background
For more than 400 years my family has maintained ties to Lenapehoking, the ancestral homelands of the Munsee Lenape along the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. We are descended from Munsee Lenape communities, including Ramapough Lenape, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, Powhatan-Renape, Sand Hill Indians, Kitchawan-Wappinger, Siwanoy, Schaghticoke, and Eastern Pennsylvania Lenape, as well as Delaware, Shinnecock, Canarsie, Mantinecock, Montaukett, Golden Hill Paugussett, Tunxis, Quinnipiac, Pequot, Mohawk, Mohegan, Cherokee, Tuscarora, Oneida, Niantic-Narragansett, Nipmuc, Taino, and Wampanoag peoples. Our lineage also includes West, Central, and East Africans, including Malagasy ancestors, alongside Dutch, English, French Huguenot, German Palatine, Irish, Moorish-Dutch, Scottish, Sephardic Jewish, and Scandinavian settler populations.
Our history is not distant. It is living. It is rooted in the everyday lives of people who navigated colonialism, enslavement, community building, resistance, and resilience. I have documented parts of this layered history in two articles, “The Life and Times of Black Patriot Samuel Freeman, Born Free and Enslaved During the American Revolution” and “A Revolutionary Breakthrough Discovering Our Van-Salee Lineage.”1 These narratives show how my Indigenous, African, and Afro-Indigenous ancestors shaped early America and how their contributions have too often been ignored and erased from public memory. The saga continues.
The Politics of Erasure: When Anniversaries Matter More Than Ancestors
There is something deeply unsettling about living in a time when commemorations are plentiful, but accountability is scarce. We are surrounded by anniversaries. The Dutch arrival. American independence. Emancipation. Each marked with plaques, panels, reenactments, and glossy articles. Yet at the very same moment, the physical evidence of Indigenous and African American life is being erased from the landscape.
This is not coincidence. It is policy. It is practice. And it is history repeating itself.
At Marshlands Conservancy in Westchester County, a proposed development threatens to disturb one of the earliest known Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous burial grounds and associated artifacts in the region, as well as gravesites and material culture linked to enslaved and Free People of Color.3 It also places at risk an historic animal cemetery that reflects an older and far more reciprocal relationship between humans, animals, and land. The timing could not be more telling. As institutions rush to celebrate sanitized versions of the past, they quietly allow the material evidence of inconvenient histories to disappear.
Erasure Is Not New. It Is Cyclical.
What we are witnessing did not begin in the present moment, but it has been accelerated by broader political and cultural trends in recent years. Across administrations and party lines, public history has increasingly been stripped of its racial and colonial context.2
Government agencies, school systems, museums, and historic sites have faced pressure to retreat from interpretive honesty. These patterns are not limited to rhetoric. They appear in policy decisions, educational debates, museum practices, and land use planning, reflecting a familiar turn toward comforting myths when deeper reckoning feels politically inconvenient.
The debate over Marshlands Conservancy demonstrates how these dynamics operate locally, where both Republicans and Democrats have alternately supported and opposed development, while patterns of historical erasure persist regardless of political affiliation.
Marshlands Conservancy and the Cost of Comfortable History
The burial ground and artifacts at Marshlands Conservancy do not fit neatly into celebratory narratives. It tells a story of Indigenous presence that predates European arrival and of African people whose lives were shaped by enslavement, forced labor, and survival in a colonial world. These were not abstract histories. These were families. These were communities. These were people who labored on and cared for this land.
Their cemetery exists not as a metaphor, but as physical testimony.
To disturb such a site without full environmental, archaeological, and cultural review is not simply poor planning. It is an act of historical violence. It continues a long tradition of treating Indigenous and African American burial grounds as expendable whenever they conflict with economic or political priorities.
What makes this moment especially troubling is the quietness with which it is happening.
Afro-Indigenous Ministers and Ancestral Continuities
One reason this struggle over Marshlands matters so deeply is personal and ancestral. My extended family includes two remarkable Afro-Indigenous ministers whose lives helped shape Indigenous and African American religious life in Connecticut and New York during the colonial and early national periods. Rev. Paul Cuffee served as a minister and missionary in the eighteenth century working with Indigenous communities in what became Connecticut and New York. His life reflects how Indigenous and African-descended people cared for community and spiritual life even while living under colonial pressures. This Paul Cuffee is not to be confused with Captain Paul Cuffee of Rhode Island who appears elsewhere in our family history.4
Rev. Samuel Occom, a Mohegan scholar, preacher, and writer, was one of the earliest Native American ministers educated within colonial institutions. His sermons, writings, and advocacy traveled widely and challenged the moral contradictions of a nation that preached liberty while sustaining enslavement and dispossession. Occom’s life and work underscore how Indigenous people were never passive subjects of history, but active intellectual and spiritual agents whose voices were later minimized or erased.4
Our family lines, including the Thompsons, Greens, Revys, Lees and related kin networks, intersect with these Afro-Indigenous histories multiple times. We are actively disentangling and documenting these relationships, which reveal long-standing patterns of intermarriage, collaboration, and shared survival strategies that are rarely acknowledged in conventional historical narratives.5
Animals, Ancestors, and Indigenous Worldviews
The presence of an animal cemetery at Marshlands further complicates the narrative in ways that Western historic frameworks often fail to acknowledge. For many Indigenous cultures, animals are not property. They are relations. They are teachers. They are participants in a shared ecological system.
Animals appear in origin stories, spiritual teachings, and daily practice. They are honored in death because they were honored in life. Burial practices involving animals reflect an understanding that humans do not stand above nature, but exist within it.6
The separation between human cemeteries and animal cemeteries is a modern colonial invention. Indigenous worldviews did not divide the living world into hierarchies of worth. Land, water, animals, and people were interconnected. To erase animal burial sites alongside human ones is to erase this worldview itself.
It is no accident that these forms of knowledge are among the first to be dismissed as sentimental or irrelevant when development is proposed.
Who Controls the Narrative Controls the Landscape
Two recently published articles in The Westchester Historian (Volume 101, No. 4, Fall 2025) illustrate how narrative control operates alongside physical erasure. Presented as objective scholarship, these pieces rely on long-standing Revolutionary War myths while marginalizing Indigenous and African American presence. The focus remains on military maneuvering and colonial actors, while the people whose land and labor made these events possible are relegated to the margins or omitted entirely.7
This is not simply about interpretation. It is about power.
When historical publications present whitewashed accounts as definitive, they shape public perception. They determine which stories are deemed credible and which are dismissed as inconvenient. Over time, these narratives justify why certain cemeteries are preserved while others are paved over.
The same mechanisms that once elevated the Lost Cause now elevate colonial nostalgia. Both depend on selective memory.
Anniversaries Without Accountability
Anniversaries are powerful tools. They create moments of reflection, but they can also function as distractions. When celebration replaces reckoning, history becomes performance rather than responsibility.
The Dutch arrival is commemorated without sustained engagement with Indigenous dispossession. Emancipation is celebrated without addressing the long afterlife of slavery. Revolutionary victories are retold without acknowledging the African and Indigenous people who were present but unfree.
In this context, the threatened destruction at Marshlands Conservancy is not an anomaly. It is the logical outcome of a historical culture that values symbolism over substance.
Refusing Erasure
Protecting burial grounds and artifacts is not about nostalgia. It is about dignity. It is about acknowledging that the past lives in the present, not only through stories but through soil, bones, and memory.
Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous and African American cemeteries are archives. Animal burial sites are archives. They hold knowledge that no plaque or article can fully replicate. Once destroyed, they cannot be recovered.
We are living in a moment when history is again being contested, rewritten, and sanitized. The question is whether we will recognize the pattern in time.
Erasure thrives when it goes unquestioned. Memory survives when it is defended.
Marshlands Conservancy is not just a local issue. It is a test of whether anniversaries will continue to matter more than ancestors, or whether we are finally willing to confront the histories that make us uncomfortable.
I am currently preparing two books slated for publication next year that will contribute to Indigenous, African, and Afro-Indigenous historiography across a 400-year span, with particular emphasis on the pre- and post-Revolutionary War periods. These books are grounded in traditional archival genealogy, genetic genealogy, oral history, and written historical records. Together, they aim to offer a more nuanced and accurate understanding of how this country came to be, centering Indigenous and African-descended peoples not as peripheral figures, but as foundational actors in American history.
Endnotes
- Teresa Vega, “A Revolutionary Breakthrough Discovering Our Van-Salee Lineage,” Radiant Roots Boricua Branches, accessed December 24, 2025,
https://radiantrootsboricuabranches.com/a-revolutionary-breakthrough-discovering-our-van-salee-lineage/;
Teresa Vega, “The Life and Times of Black Patriot Samuel Freeman, Born Free and Enslaved During the American Revolution,” Radiant Roots Boricua Branches, accessed December 24, 2025,
https://radiantrootsboricuabranches.com/the-life-and-times-of-black-patriot-samuel-freeman-born-free-and-enslaved-during-the-american-revolution/.
↩ - The term “politics of erasure” is widely used in academic literature across various fields, including sociology, political science, critical race theory, and art history. The concept highlights how power dynamics influence whose histories, identities, and voices are recognized versus marginalized or eliminated. For historical and theoretical context for the issues raised in this essay, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
↩ - Jay Sears, “Skepticism and Calls for Transparency Greet Marshlands Conservancy Expansion Plans,” MyRye.com, December 6, 2025,
https://myrye.com/2025/12/marshlands-conservancy-expansion-plans/.
↩ - Paul E. Sluby Sr., The Family Recollections of Beulah A. Shippen and Mabel Shippen Hatcher: Roots in the Shinnecock Indian Reservation, Long Island, New York (1994);
William DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1899), accessed December 14, 2025,
https://archive.org/details/samsonoccomchris00love;
“Paul Cuffee (missionary),” Wikipedia, accessed December 14, 2025,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Cuffee_(missionary).
↩ - For additional context on my broader genealogical and historical research, I have written several blog posts on our Thompson, Green, Lee family lines as well as my Afro-Indigenous roots in Puerto Rico (Borikén). See
https://radiantrootsboricuabranches.com/off-the-battlefield-but-still-suffering-from-ptsd/;
https://radiantrootsboricuabranches.com/part-iii-the-dna-trail-from-madagascar-to-virginia/;
https://radiantrootsboricuabranches.com/killing-us-softly-with-the-us-colonial-song-puerto-ricans-matter/.
For related public history concerns, see Claire Garland, “Indian Summer at Sand Hill: The Revy and Richardson Families of the Jersey Shore,”
https://njs.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/njs,
and Nohham Cachat-Schilling, “Today in MA,”
https://www.ethicarch.org/today-in-ma.
↩ - For further reading on Indigenous knowledge, land use, and ecology, please refer to The Public History Project, “Colonial Roots of the Current Climate Crises,”
https://www.publichistoryproject.org/;
Nohham Cachat-Schilling, “Erasure of Black Archaeology: Drowning Lands—An Intersection of Marginality,”
https://www.ethicarch.org/post/erasure-of-black-archaeology-drowning-lands-an-intersection-of-marginality;
Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999);
Winona LaDuke, To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2020);
Kerry Hardy, Notes on a Lost Flute: A Field Guide to the Wabanaki (Hinsdale, NH: Down East Books, 2009).
↩ - Char Weigel, “The Week That Won The War: The Story of the Firing on the Vulture,” The Westchester Historian 101, no. 4 (Fall 2025): 100–112;
Marc Cheshire, “The Incident on Teller’s Point,” The Westchester Historian 101, no. 4 (Fall 2025): 113–119.
↩ - Weigel and Cheshire’s research and subsequent exhibition, Treason of the Blackest Dye: The True Story of Arnold Andre, and the Three Honest Militiamen, is an example of highly creative and problematic historiography. My critique of this exhibit can be found at
https://radiantrootsboricuabranches.com/denial-is-a-river-on-the-hudson-they-dont-know-jack/.
↩ - In a personal communication, my colleague at The Public History Project (see “Who We Are”:
https://www.publichistoryproject.org/who-we-are/), ecological historian Kerry Hardy reminded me that one reason we tend to forget Marshlands’ Indigenous past is that almost all of the resident Siwanoy were wiped out in the Pound Ridge Massacre in 1644. He noted accounts describing hundreds killed in a midnight ambush led by Hendrick Van Dyck and John Underhill and observed that the Underhill Society still exists today.
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