We preserved these histories when archives failed to collect them, when institutions failed to recognize them, and when official narratives denied they existed.
Historians often speak of recovering lost voices.
Yet many of the voices I encounter in my research were never truly lost.
The stories survived in families.
They survived in churches.
They survived in cemeteries.
They survived in oral traditions.
They survived in community memory.
They survived because descendants carried them.
The question is not whether these stories survived.
The question is whether the institutions that claim to preserve history are willing to recognize the people who preserved them first.
As a genealogist, DNA researcher, public historian, and descendant of the families I study, I often find myself moving between two worlds. One is the world of archives, academic scholarship, public history, and institutional authority. The other is the world of descendants, family memory, oral tradition, community knowledge, and lived inheritance.
At their best, these worlds enrich one another.
At their worst, they speak past one another.
For nearly two decades, I have encountered the same tensions repeatedly. They appear in debates over Indigenous identity, public monuments, historical interpretation, archival silences, and even the stories told about my own ancestors.
At first glance, these controversies seem unrelated.
They are not.
Whether discussing Anthony Jansen Van Salee, the Ramapough Lenape Nation, Rose Fortune, Newark’s Colored School, Plane Street Colored Presbyterian Church, or Revolutionary War veteran Rifle Jack Peterson, the same question emerges again and again:
Who gets to define the past?
Paper Genocide and the Limits of the Archive
Long before I understood the phrase “paper genocide,” I encountered its effects.
My ancestors appeared as Indian in one record, Negro in another, Mulatto in a third, Colored in a fourth.
Entire communities disappeared between census years.
Tribal identities vanished from official records while surviving within families.
Histories preserved through oral tradition appeared nowhere in the archive.
The deeper I looked, the more I realized that the archive itself was part of the story.
Colonial records were not created to preserve the lives of Indigenous people, Africans, or people of mixed ancestry. They were created by governments, churches, courts, and institutions that often viewed those communities through the lenses of property, labor, taxation, and social control.
The people who created the records determined which identities mattered.
As a result, entire communities were routinely misidentified, simplified, or erased.
The archive remains an essential source.
But it is not a neutral one.
Nor is it the only source.
For descendants, reconstructing the past requires more than documents alone. It requires oral history, family memory, community knowledge, landscape memory, archaeology, and increasingly, genetic genealogy.
The archive is part of the story.
It is not the whole story.
When Interpretation Becomes Orthodoxy
Historical works do not exist in a vacuum.
Books shape public understanding. They influence journalists, educators, museums, historical societies, preservation organizations, government agencies, and descendants seeking to learn about their own communities.
That influence carries responsibility.
The problem is not that scholars offer interpretations.
The problem arises when interpretations harden into orthodoxy.
Over time, a single book can become so influential that later generations stop questioning its assumptions. New evidence is measured against the book rather than the other way around.
Many descendants begin their journey trusting the books they find. Most of us did. We assume the authors know more than we do because they possess credentials, institutional support, or published works.
Only later do we discover that entire chapters of our history were omitted, misunderstood, or simply unknown when those books were written.
David Steven Cohen’s The Ramapo Mountain People was published in 1974.
At the time, it reflected the evidence available to him and the questions scholars were asking. Yet the historical landscape of 1974 and the historical landscape of today are not the same.
Thousands of records have since been digitized.
Entire fields of scholarship have emerged.
Atlantic World studies transformed how historians understand identity and community formation.
Genetic genealogy has revolutionized family history research.
Descendant communities have recovered oral histories, photographs, family records, cemetery evidence, and kinship networks that earlier researchers never had access to.
Historical authority should expand in response to new evidence.
It should not remain frozen in time.
History is not a verdict.
It is an ongoing conversation.
When a book becomes immune to revision, the conversation ends.
And when the conversation ends, communities stop being seen as living peoples and become trapped inside someone else’s interpretation of who they are.
We Are Hungry for More Information
“We are the fabric of this country. There are stories that have to be told.” — Chief Vincent Mann
Descendants search for answers because we are hungry for more information about our ancestors.
We enter archives.
We read local histories.
We visit museums.
We attend lectures.
We search for monuments.
We read the books that institutions tell us are authoritative.
Yet too often we encounter the same distortions repeated over and over again.
Communities become stereotypes.
Families become footnotes.
Survivance becomes disappearance.
Complexity becomes certainty.
We arrive looking for ourselves and discover that someone else has already decided who we are.
This pattern extends far beyond any single community.
For decades, Afro-Indigenous communities throughout the Northeast have been told that they disappeared, assimilated, migrated away, or ceased to exist.
Yet descendants continue to uncover evidence demonstrating far more complicated realities.
Families remained.
Communities adapted.
Identities evolved.
Kinship networks endured.
The historical record was often incomplete.
The people were not.
Critical Fabulation and Historical Responsibility
Historian Saidiya Hartman introduced the concept of critical fabulation to address the violence of archival silence.
Hartman recognized that many marginalized people survive in historical records only as fragments. Their lives appear through the writings of enslavers, colonial officials, judges, missionaries, and others who possessed power over them.
Yet Hartman’s work also offered an important warning.
Acknowledging silence does not eliminate the obligation to distinguish between evidence and speculation.
Critical fabulation was never intended to transform possibility into certainty.
It was an attempt to think carefully about what archives conceal while remaining honest about what cannot be known.
As descendants and genealogists, we confront this challenge constantly.
We know records are incomplete.
We know records contain errors.
We know entire communities were misclassified or omitted.
Yet recognizing these limitations does not give us permission to fill every gap with a preferred narrative.
Sometimes the most honest answer is that we do not know.
Historical humility is not a weakness.
It is an ethical responsibility.
Who Gets to Define Belonging?
At its core, this debate is not simply about history.
It is about authority.
Who has the authority to determine who belongs?
Who has the authority to define Indigenous identity?
Who has the authority to decide whether descendant communities are legitimate?
For generations, scholars, institutions, recognition systems, and government agencies have often assumed that those answers should come from outside the communities themselves.
Yet descendants never stopped preserving their histories.
We preserved them in family Bibles.
We preserved them in oral traditions.
We preserved them in church records.
We preserved them in cemeteries.
We preserved them in photographs.
We preserved them in kinship networks.
We preserved them in community memory.
We preserved them in our DNA.
The question is not whether descendants possess knowledge.
The question is whether institutions are willing to acknowledge it.
For many descendants in the Northeast, these debates are not theoretical.
They shape how communities are represented in museums, classrooms, historical markers, government reports, and public discourse.
They influence which histories are considered legitimate and which are dismissed.
They influence whose voices are heard and whose voices are ignored.
For decades, discussions surrounding the Ramapough Lenape Nation and other descendant communities have often been framed through the lens of recognition, authenticity, and legitimacy.
Yet these conversations frequently overlook a fundamental reality.
Communities do not cease to exist because scholars fail to recognize them.
Communities do not disappear because they become difficult to classify.
Communities do not vanish because historical records become fragmented.
The descendants remain.
The families remain.
The kinship networks remain.
The stories remain.
One of the most enduring examples of this dynamic can be found in the influence of David Steven Cohen’s The Ramapo Mountain People.
Although published in 1974, the book continues to shape public perceptions of the Ramapough and other Indigenous descendant communities throughout the region.
For many readers, it became the definitive text.
For many descendants, it became a barrier.
Its conclusions were often treated as settled fact even as new evidence emerged, new scholarship developed, and descendants themselves began producing their own histories.
The result was not merely an academic disagreement.
It was a struggle over who possessed the authority to define community identity.
The irony is that descendant communities were never passive participants in these debates.
They were conducting research.
They were preserving family histories.
They were documenting cemeteries.
They were maintaining oral traditions.
They were tracing kinship networks across generations.
They were doing the work.
Yet too often their contributions were treated as secondary to institutional authority.
This pattern persists today.
Descendant communities are frequently asked to provide stories, records, photographs, and genealogies.
Yet when public narratives are constructed, descendants often find themselves excluded from the interpretive process.
Knowledge is gathered.
Stories are collected.
Research is incorporated.
The descendants themselves become invisible.
For many Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous, and African-descended communities, extraction has never been limited to land or natural resources. It extends to culture, artifacts, stories, genealogies, and community memory. Communities are frequently asked to share what they know while receiving little authority over how that knowledge is ultimately interpreted. This dynamic helps explain why many descendants remain cautious. The concern is not the sharing of knowledge. The concern is the commodification of community memory.
The issue is not whether historians, anthropologists, or public historians have expertise.
They do.
The issue is whether expertise is understood broadly enough to include descendants as partners in the production of historical knowledge.
We are not asking to replace historians.
We are asking historians to recognize that descendants are historians too.
Our methods may differ.
Our sources may differ.
Our perspectives may differ.
But our knowledge matters.
And any historical practice that excludes descendant voices will inevitably produce an incomplete account of the past.
The Communities That Built Newark
Perhaps nowhere has this issue felt more personal than in Newark, New Jersey.
When most people encounter the history of Black Newark, the narrative often begins with nationally recognized figures such as Frederick Douglass or institutions such as Rutgers University.
Those stories matter.
But they are not the beginning of the story.
Long before Rutgers became a university and long before Frederick Douglass visited Newark in 1849, Afro-Indigenous, African-descended, and Indigenous families were building Newark.
Some of these families can be traced to the aftermath of King Philip’s War.
Others survived Dutch slavery in Essex and Bergen Counties.
Others endured forced migration and illegal trafficking through the Van Wickle network in 1818.
Together they established churches, schools, mutual aid societies, businesses, abolitionist organizations, and community institutions that sustained Black Newark for generations.
Yet these communities are often reduced to supporting characters within larger institutional narratives.
One example is the public interpretation of Newark’s Colored School.
Historical markers correctly acknowledge James Miller Baxter Jr. as Newark’s first Black principal.
His accomplishments deserve recognition.
But the story did not begin with Baxter.
Nor did it begin with the school building itself.
Decades earlier, Black Newarkers had already created educational institutions through their churches and community networks.
The King family, the Thompson family, and their extended kinship networks were deeply involved in the struggle to educate Black children when public institutions offered little support.
Educational instruction moved through Black religious institutions including the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and later the Plane Street Colored Presbyterian Church.
The community built the infrastructure.
The school came later.
The difference matters.
One version of history focuses on a building and an administrator.
The other focuses on the community that made the institution possible.
The same pattern appears in discussions of Frederick Douglass.
Douglass deserves every honor he has received.
But Newark’s Black abolitionist movement did not begin when he arrived.
He entered a community that already existed.
A community built by Black ministers, educators, church leaders, laborers, entrepreneurs, and families who had been laying the foundation for freedom long before nationally recognized figures appeared in the historical record.
Among them were members of the King and Thompson families whose lives intersected with churches, schools, abolitionist organizations, and Underground Railroad networks.
I left the site with the unsettling realization that generations of community builders had been reduced to the margins of their own story. My ancestors not only worked on the Underground Railroad until its final days of operation, but later became educators, institution builders, and community leaders. Yet the Thompson name, and particularly the contributions of Thompson women who labored as nurses, cooks, seamstresses, and organizers, remained largely invisible. Mary Thompson’s Dutch oven, featured decades later in the Newark Sunday Call Magazine, stands as a testament to a legacy of resistance and community-building that extended far beyond what appeared on the marker. After more than a decade collaborating with Rutgers scholars and students, the omission felt less like an oversight and more like a reminder of how easily communities can disappear from public memory.
Their story is not separate from Newark’s history.
It is Newark’s history.
When public narratives focus primarily on famous individuals and institutions, something important is lost.
A story of community-building becomes a story of individual achievement.
A story of collective action becomes a story of exceptional figures.
A story about generations of Black Newarkers becomes a story about the people who arrived after the foundations had already been laid.
The issue is not that Frederick Douglass or James Baxter receive too much recognition.
The issue is that the communities that made their work possible receive too little.
Institutions are remembered.
Buildings are commemorated.
Famous individuals are celebrated.
The communities that built them slowly disappear from view.
And that, too, is a form of erasure.
Communities, Not Heroes
One of the most persistent patterns in public history is the tendency to celebrate individuals while overlooking the communities that made their achievements possible.
Heroes are easier to commemorate.
Communities are more complicated.
Heroes fit neatly onto plaques, monuments, and historical markers.
Communities require us to confront the messy realities of kinship, labor, migration, survival, and collective action.
Yet communities are where history actually happens.
I encountered this lesson repeatedly while researching our Revolutionary War veteran Rifle Jack Peterson.
Public memory preserved his nickname.
It preserved stories about his military service.
It celebrated him as an individual.
Yet much of the broader context surrounding his life was allowed to fade.
Through genealogical research, descendant testimony, DNA evidence, local records, church documents, and family histories, a far more complex story emerged.
Rifle Jack was not an isolated historical character.
He belonged to an interconnected Afro-Indigenous world shaped by military service, migration, land loss, enslavement, freedom-seeking, kinship networks, and community relationships stretching across generations.
The deeper I looked, the more obvious the pattern became.
Rifle Jack was never the story.
The community was.
His life only becomes fully understandable when viewed within the larger network of families, churches, military service, Indigenous survivance, and Black institution-building that surrounded him.
The same lesson applies to countless historical figures.
Anthony Jansen Van Salee cannot be understood apart from the world of Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, better known as Mourad Reis, and the larger Atlantic and Mediterranean networks that shaped his family.
Frederick Douglass cannot be understood apart from the communities that welcomed him, supported him, and worked alongside him.
James Miller Baxter Jr. cannot be understood apart from the generations of Black Newarkers who fought to establish educational institutions before he became Newark’s first Black principal.
The problem arises when public memory reverses this relationship.
The community becomes background.
The individual becomes the story.
As a result, generations of descendants disappear from view.
One version of history celebrates an individual.
The other restores a community.
The choice between those approaches has profound implications for how we understand the past.
Preservation and Interpretation
One of the most important lessons I have learned as a genealogist is that preservation and interpretation are not the same thing.
Yet public history often rewards one while overlooking the other.
What struck me most about the Treason of the Blackest Ink exhibit was not what it included but what it excluded. Rifle Jack Peterson and Moses Sherwood appeared only briefly, while other figures occupied center stage. As a Daughter of the American Revolution, I could not help but wonder how children of color would experience the exhibit. Would they see themselves reflected as participants in the struggle for independence, or merely as spectators to a story belonging to others? Public history has a responsibility not only to recover the past, but to ensure that future generations can recognize themselves within it.
The person who writes the book becomes the authority.
The person who curates the exhibit becomes the authority.
The person who designs the monument becomes the authority.
The interpreter becomes visible.
The preservers often remain invisible.
This distinction matters because many of the histories now receiving public attention survived only because descendants carried them forward.
Long before publishers, museums, historical societies, and universities became interested in these stories, descendants were preserving them.
Family members saved photographs.
Churches preserved records.
Communities maintained cemeteries.
Genealogists reconstructed family networks.
Oral historians recorded memories.
Descendants carried the stories.
By the time a book, exhibit, documentary, or public memorial appears, generations of labor have already occurred.
The interpretation becomes public.
The preservation disappears from view.
I have witnessed this tension repeatedly in my own work.
Research concerning figures such as Rose Fortune increasingly draws upon contributions made by descendants, genealogists, and community researchers. This growing interest is welcome. For generations, many of these stories received little attention from mainstream institutions.
Yet increased visibility also raises questions regarding attribution, collaboration, and scholarly responsibility.
The issue is not that descendant research is being used.
Historical knowledge should be shared.
The issue arises when descendant researchers are insufficiently credited, inaccurately represented, or excluded from the interpretive process.
Attribution is not merely a professional courtesy.
It is an acknowledgment that historical knowledge is collective.
No researcher works alone.
Every discovery rests upon the labor of others who preserved records, shared family histories, conducted earlier investigations, and carried knowledge across generations.
This principle extends beyond genealogy.
It applies equally to public historians, museum professionals, artists, scholars, documentary filmmakers, and authors.
The strongest historical work emerges through collaboration.
The weakest emerges through extraction.
When communities are treated primarily as sources of information rather than partners in interpretation, familiar patterns reappear.
Research is gathered.
Stories are collected.
Knowledge is incorporated.
The descendants themselves become invisible.
Descendants seeking to reconstruct their family histories require evidence, not merely possibility. When speculative narratives become widely accepted, they can inadvertently create new obstacles for future researchers attempting to distinguish documented history from imaginative reconstruction.
This is precisely where Saidiya Hartman’s warning regarding critical fabulation remains relevant.
Historical imagination can be a powerful tool.
Archives contain silences.
Records contain gaps.
Entire lives survive only in fragments.
Yet the existence of those silences does not eliminate our obligation to distinguish between evidence and speculation.
Nor does it relieve us of the responsibility to remain accountable to the communities whose histories are being reconstructed.
Historical humility is not an obstacle to interpretation.
It is a safeguard against replacing one form of erasure with another.
The challenge is not imagination itself.
The challenge is ensuring that imagination remains accountable to evidence, community memory, and the people whose histories are being told.
Perhaps this is the central lesson running through all of these stories.
The archive is not enough.
The book is not enough.
The monument is not enough.
The historical marker is not enough.
The descendants matter too.
Because the stories did not survive through documents alone.
They survived because people carried them.
The Van Salees and the Problem of Fragmentation
Perhaps no example better illustrates the challenges of historical interpretation than the story of Anthony Jansen Van Salee and his father, Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, better known as Mourad Reis.
For generations, historians have been fascinated by Anthony.
They have emphasized his reputation.
They have emphasized his conflicts with colonial authorities.
They have emphasized his unusual place within Dutch New Netherland.
More recently, scholars have attempted to situate him within larger discussions of race, migration, identity, and belonging.
These are worthwhile endeavors.
Yet I often find myself returning to a different question.
What happens when Anthony is separated from the larger family and historical context that produced him?
Anthony did not emerge in isolation.
He was the son of a man whose life traversed some of the most complex political, religious, and cultural boundaries of the early modern world.
Jan Janszoon van Haarlem, known throughout the Mediterranean as Mourad Reis, moved through the worlds of the Dutch Republic, Spain, North Africa, Islam, Christianity, privateering, captivity, commerce, and empire.
His life unfolded within a society populated by converts, captives, renegades, Moriscos, crypto-Christians, crypto-Jews, and crypto-Muslims.
Identity in that world was rarely fixed.
It was negotiated.
Adapted.
Concealed.
Reinvented.
Survived.
Yet modern historical narratives often seek certainty where historical reality was far more ambiguous.
At one recent book event, another Afro-Dutch descendant from Barbados and Jamaica approached me and my cousins almost immediately. She began showing us family photographs on her phone, telling us that we looked like her relatives. She understood instinctively that the Van Salee story was more than a narrative about Anthony’s proximity to whiteness. It was also a story about Abraham’s descendants, Mourad Reis’s privateering legacy, Afro-Dutch kinship networks, and the wider Atlantic world those families inhabited.
Other descendants in the room listened carefully, but some felt the historical record had been stretched to fit a predetermined narrative. Some were troubled by the language used to describe Grietje. Others wondered why more Turkish Ottoman archival sources had not been consulted.
A surviving marriage record becomes proof that no other marriage existed.
A documented conversion becomes proof that earlier Islamic affiliations were insignificant.
Documentary silence becomes evidence that alternative possibilities never existed.
But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
This is especially true in a world where concealment was frequently a matter of survival.
For Moriscos living under increasing persecution in Spain, religious conformity was often performative.
For converts navigating multiple worlds, identity could be fluid, strategic, and situational.
For people living between empires, cultures, and faiths, the documentary record often captures only fragments of a much larger story.
This does not mean every family tradition should be accepted uncritically.
Nor does it mean every undocumented possibility should be treated as fact.
It means we should approach the historical record with humility.
The problem arises when uncertainty disappears.
When speculation becomes certainty.
When surviving documents are treated as complete representations of lives that we know were far more complicated.
My concern with some interpretations of the Van Salee family is not that they acknowledge complexity.
My concern is that they sometimes narrow complexity into familiarity.
Anthony becomes easier to categorize.
Mourad Reis becomes easier to explain.
The family becomes easier to fit within modern expectations.
Yet the very thing that makes the Van Salee story significant is its refusal to fit neatly into those categories.
The family’s history sits at the intersection of North Africa, Europe, Islam, Christianity, slavery, freedom, migration, privateering, colonialism, and racial formation.
To separate Anthony from Abraham,
to separate Anthony from Mourad Reis,
to separate the descendants from the larger family story,
to separate the family from the communities they later helped create,
is to fragment a history that was never fragmented in life.
The result is not greater clarity.
It is a reduction of historical complexity.
And complexity, not certainty, is often where the truth resides.
Epilogue: Harlem
Shortly after completing this essay, I attended a genealogy conference in Harlem sponsored by the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of New York.
The timing felt appropriate.
For years I had been writing about descendant knowledge, historical authority, community memory, and the struggle against erasure. In Harlem, I found those ideas made visible.
Throughout the day, descendants exchanged photographs, preserved family records, shared oral histories, compared DNA results, and reconnected kinship networks separated by time, migration, and historical circumstance.
I watched descendants discuss the future of ancestral clothing and family heirlooms. Others debated the promises and dangers of artificial intelligence in genealogy. Many expressed concerns about the appropriation of community histories and the ways descendant knowledge is often extracted without meaningful collaboration.
Again and again, I heard variations of the same question:
Who will carry these stories forward?
At one table, descendants of families buried in the Rye African American Cemetery stood before a display honoring community elders. For some visitors, the names represented local history. For descendants, they represented family.
At another table, the Lost Souls Project documented victims of New York’s domestic slave trade. Most visitors saw a list of names. I saw ancestors.
Throughout the day, I reconnected with cousins, collaborators, researchers, and community historians. Some I had not seen in years. Others greeted me as though no time had passed at all.
The conference concluded with a libation ceremony.
As water moved from vessel to vessel, participants were invited to speak the names of their ancestors aloud.
Some spoke softly.
Some hesitated.
Others remained silent.
We did not.
The names came easily because we had spent years searching for them.
We had found them in church records, pension files, cemetery transcriptions, family Bibles, oral histories, and DNA matches.
We had carried them with us.
Standing in that room, listening as ancestors were called into memory, I was reminded that the central question of this essay was never whether the stories survived.
They survived because descendants carried them.
The descendants remain.
The families remain.
The kinship networks remain.
The stories remain.
And as long as there are people willing to speak their names, they will remain.
Conclusion: The Stories We Carried
This essay began with a simple question.
Who gets to define the past?
After years of research, I have come to believe that this is ultimately the wrong question.
No single person defines the past.
No single institution defines the past.
No single book defines the past.
The past is constructed through an ongoing conversation among archives, communities, descendants, scholars, genealogists, public historians, and memory itself.
Problems emerge when one voice claims authority over all the others.
When books become orthodoxy.
When institutions become gatekeepers.
When descendants become invisible.
When communities become footnotes in their own stories.
Throughout this essay I have discussed many seemingly different subjects.
The Ramapough Lenape Nation.
David Steven Cohen.
Anthony Jansen Van Salee.
Mourad Reis.
Rose Fortune.
Rifle Jack Peterson.
Plane Street Colored Presbyterian Church.
The Colored School.
Black Newark.
Historical markers.
Public memory.
At first glance these appear to be separate conversations.
They are not.
Each reflects the same underlying struggle.
A struggle over authority.
A struggle over memory.
A struggle over who gets to tell the story.
For generations, descendants were told that their communities had disappeared.
That their histories could not be proven.
That their identities were too complicated.
That the records did not support their claims.
Yet descendants continued to preserve those histories.
They preserved them in churches.
They preserved them in cemeteries.
They preserved them in family reunions.
They preserved them in oral traditions.
They preserved them in community memory.
They preserved them in names.
They preserved them in photographs.
They preserved them in family Bibles.
They preserved them in DNA.
Most importantly, they preserved them for future generations.
The stories were never lost.
The descendants carried them.
We are not asking historians to abandon evidence.
We are not asking institutions to surrender scholarship.
We are not asking descendants to become the sole arbiters of historical truth.
We are asking for something much simpler.
We are asking that descendant knowledge be treated as knowledge.
We are asking that historical authority remain open to revision.
We are asking that communities be included in the stories told about them.
We are asking that preservation receive the same respect as interpretation.
We are asking that historical humility become an ethical obligation rather than an afterthought.
Because the past does not belong solely to archives.
It does not belong solely to institutions.
It does not belong solely to historians.
It belongs to the people who lived it, the communities that preserved it, and the descendants who continue to carry it forward.
The stories were never lost. We carried them all along.
Sources and Further Reading
- Teresa Vega, “The Politics of Erasure: When Anniversaries Matter More Than Ancestors,” Radiant Roots, Boricua Branches, December 24, 2025.
- Teresa Vega, “Repairing Erasure: Indigenous Identity and Paper Genocide,” Radiant Roots, Boricua Branches, January 20, 2024.
- Teresa Vega, “Decolonizing the Archives,” Our Land, Our Stories.
- Teresa Vega, “What It Means to Be a Ramapough Lenape Descendant,” Our Land, Our Stories.
- “A Genealogy of Evidence & Opinion,” Our Land, Our Stories.
- “Native and Black,” Our Land, Our Stories.
- “Told & Untold Histories,” Our Land, Our Stories.
- “Native American History in New Jersey,” Our Land, Our Stories.
- John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Reckoning Ecocide’s Ground Zero,” Our Land, Our Stories.
- Teresa Vega, “The Legacy of David S. Cohen’s Ramapo Mountain People and the Rise of Indigenous Hatekeepers,” Radiant Roots, Boricua Branches, April 10, 2023.
