Indigenous Catskills 101

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Justin Wexler  0:00  
The Catskill Mountains are one reason why the Esopus and Catskill Indians were really some of the last Lenape people to leave their homeland. 

Brett Barry  0:10  
On the heels of Indigenous Peoples' Day, Kaatscast sat down with Justin Wexler of Wild Hudson Valley for an interview about the Catskills' own native history. If you've ever wondered about the people who came before us and where they are today, stay tuned. Kaatscast would like to thank the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation for a generous grant that helps ensure the continued production of this podcast with a renewed focus on Catskills history starting with this very episode. Thanks also to Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599; inquire about some of the books Justin recommends later in the show. In preparing for this episode, it was important that we identify a trustworthy source of information and having joined some of Justin Wexler's previous presentations on the subject of indigenous people, he was top of mind. While Justin is native to the area, he's not native and doesn't pretend to be. These are important details that came up in the course of our conversation; and in just a moment, you'll hear why interviewing and indigenous Catskiller in the Catskills is an unlikely proposition. We met up with Justin at Wild Hudson Valley's Eco Camp in Cairo, New York.

Justin Wexler  1:49  
I grew up just across the river in Hudson and I've lived much of my life in Columbia, Greene, and Albany counties. As a young kid, I mean, really, all the way back to a toddler, I was obsessed with the outdoors with the ... with nature; and by the time I was in second or third grade, I realized that the people who would have the deepest knowledge about the natural world would be the people who had lived; where I lived for the most generations and going to the school library, I did a lot of reading and I soon realized that the native inhabitants of the Hudson Valley, Delaware Valley, and Catskills; no longer lived here that they had been driven west almost three centuries ago. So ... by ninth grade, I started the historical research that I'm still doing today, so it's been many years of working with historic documents and connecting with the native people descended from here. So ... normally, when I'm doing a presentation or lecture or leading a walk, I start off by describing how I conduct my research and I always make sure that anyone present is aware of the fact that I am not a native person. I am not Lenape. I am not representing any of their communities and that I strive to do my work as objectively and respectfully as possible. But, really, I think I might be the only person who maybe one of two people or three people on the planet who have explored this history in this kind of depth. I work with their contemporary communities with their cultural revitalization and language departments to help the Lenape people, Mohican people figure out, you know, on earth vocabulary that was lost on their exodus west and I work with them on exploring places that were important to their ancestors when they were still living here and tracing families: tracing even their last names to their roots here in the Catskills and the region around.

Brett Barry  3:59  
And the fact of the matter is that the people who are native to this area; no longer to live in this area.

Justin Wexler  4:05  
The majority of the native people to the Catskills region today are living in Ontario with some descendants in Wisconsin and Oklahoma; and it's been that way for anywhere from 200 to 280 years, depending on which ancestors moved and when.

Brett Barry  4:23  
So, there are a lot of names that float around in this area and we're trying to wrap our heads around what they all mean and how they're related to each other: Lenni-Lenape, Stockbridge-Munsee, Algonquian, Mohican, Esopus, Delaware. How do all of these relate to each other and are they all relevant to this region?

Justin Wexler  4:47  
Yes, they are all relevant to this region. I actually have created a handout with a glossary for educators and organizations explaining those terms and others because there's so much confusion. If you go back in time, just a few centuries, virtually any native person you'd encounter in the Catskill Mountains and in the Delaware and Hudson Valleys would be speaking a dialect of an Eastern Algonquian language and that language would fall within a sub-grouping that linguists ... some linguists classify as the Delaware and family, so these are a group of languages that descend from what might be called "Proto-Delaware," and that might have been spoken fifteen hundred years ago; and over time as accents shifted into dialects, those became mutually unintelligible and became new languages that include Mohican and what linguists call Munsee and Unami, which are the three main languages, which were spoken from Lake Champlain all the way down to Delaware Bay. So, all of these people call themselves ... "Lenape." That was true [800 years ago] and that is true today and all of their communities they use variations of the word Lunaapeew, "Nunãapaw," which just means human being. Even the Mohican people who have also that nationality as Mohican use the word ... "Lenape," which is the same word. That's also true for other Algonquian peoples. I find a lot of confusion in the Hudson Valley run the word ... "Algonquian." Algonquian refers to a language family. It's a language family that stretches across the northern part of the North American continent and includes dozens of different languages. It derives from Algonquin, which is an ethnic group of people speaking Algonquian language who live in the Ottawa River Valley in Canada, but there is no people in Hudson Valley who ever called themselves ... "Algonquin" or anything like that. Algonquian is just a word used by linguists to classify languages. "Lenni-Lenape" was a term coined by Lenape people in the 18th century to differentiate themselves from other native people; originally they called themselves ... "Lenape," and when they met white people, they call them "waapsiit lunaapeew," which is white people or when they met black people, they call them ... "nzuksiit lunaapeew," so same idea; and soon, "Lenape" was used to refer to indigenous people; and in order to differentiate themselves from other Lenape people, they call themselves ... "Lenni-Lenape," which just means original ... original human beings. So, they're like ... they're like the legit Lenape. It's not used very often. It's Lenape is what you hear most often.

Brett Barry  7:24  
How long has this area been inhabited by human beings?

Justin Wexler  7:28  
Oh, man, that's, I mean, not too long after it became inhabitable. My work really focuses on the late Woodland period, which goes back about twelve hundred years ago. But, I mean, humans have been in the Hudson Valley for at least eight to ten thousand years ... maybe longer ... new evidence surfaces all the time that pushes back how long humans have been in the Americas, so a very long time.

Brett Barry  7:54  
So, Lenape may not even have been the first people.

Justin Wexler  7:57  
They definitely weren't. According to the oral histories, they were not the first people here and that is supported by now by genetic studies, linguistic studies, and the archaeological record are those ... that's always questionable and always argue; heated debates when it comes to archaeology. But, yeah, Algonquian languages seem to have originated in the Columbia River Plateau area, close to the Pacific Northwest, maybe six thousand years ago [six-seven thousand years ago]. The ancestors of Algonquian speakers moved east over thousands of years and many generations before getting to the Atlantic at some point in the past couple thousand years.

Brett Barry  8:34  
And what was the relationship with the Catskills? Did they live in the mountains or did they use it as a hunting area? Where were they and how did they move around?

Justin Wexler  8:42  
I would venture to say that in the Catskill Mountains as a whole over the past fifteen hundred to two thousand years, they were inhabited less frequently by people as their society shifted more towards relying on corn-based agriculture and shifted more; relying very heavily on the anadromous fish that come up the Hudson and Delaware rivers like shad or striped bass.

Brett Barry  9:11  
Quick sidenote ... anadromous fish hatched in freshwater. Then, spent most of their lives in the ocean before returning to freshwater to spawn, repeating the cycle.

Justin Wexler  9:21  
But they were certainly intimately familiar with the Catskill Mountains region and would have been passing through and camping for hunting and traveling from one community to another across the mountains; and by the early 18th century, the milder more fertile valleys in the Catskill Mountains became a refuge for the Esopus and Catskill Indians to retreat to really, you know, within their own homeland, but to retreat to as it became more and more difficult for them to live closer to the Hudson and Delaware rivers. The Catskill Mountains are one reason why the Esopus and Catskill Indians were really some of the last Lenape people to leave their homeland. Lenape people in the coastal plain down in New Jersey or the lower parts of the Delaware River had been forced out of their homeland for the most part by the 1720-1730s with the exception of a few families and individuals; whereas in the Catskills, they just retreated back to the East Branch Upper Schoharie and in the West Branch and we're there might still be there today, if it wasn't for the American Revolution.

Brett Barry  10:27  
The American Revolution is what you'd attribute to the final straw.

Justin Wexler  10:32  
Yes, by the 1660s or '70s and I'm really going to skip over a huge amount of very important history. By that point, they grew to understand what selling land meant to their colonial neighbors. They have a very different concept of, let's say, land stewardship, as opposed to ownership. You inherited watershed-based territories through both your parents, although you belong to your mother's clan and to her linguistic group. They're a matrilineal society, but it's not quite the concept of land ownership that exists in Western Europe and in much of the world today. So, that took a generation or two for them to understand. When the Dutch first came here, they were here to trade through the ... what became the West India Company and there were rules about fairly buying the land from the native inhabitants because they wanted to avoid conflict and war. Of course, that didn't happen. Conflict did happen. That's a whole other story and they became experts at swindling people out of land and creating fraudulent deeds, which the native inhabitants of the region that had to fight and still are in some cases fighting today [centuries later]. But basically by the 1760s, they had legally on paper, sometimes fraudulently lost title to all of their homeland [ancestral land]. That was partially through land deeds, partially through the various treaties at Fort Stanwix in the 1760s that created a border line that mostly followed the chain of the Appalachian Mountains and created Indian territory to the west and British colonies to the east. So, by the late 1760s, the Esopus and Catskill Indians were regularly meeting with the British Indian Superintendent, Sir William Johnson, to figure out where they could move and live. They actually by this period had many close relationships with their colonial neighbors. We have many records of the friendships that they maintained with their neighbors. However, the land could no longer support their traditional way of life. The best bottomlands for growing corn ... they no longer had access to especially closer to the Hudson River and they were increasingly losing the best areas for growing corn on the East and West Branches of the Delaware River as more and more settlers legally and illegally were settling there. Many of the streams had been dammed by this point for grist mills and sawmill, so the fish populations that they relied on in the spring and fall were declining and the hunting had really declined and much of Hudson Valley. It was still good. Out in the Western Catskills, there were still good populations of bear and deer and elk. They knew that, you know, time was not on their side as the non-native population increased, so they were meeting with the British Indian Superintendent to figure out where to go. They had a unique relationship with the Six Nations or Haudenosaunee people where the Esopus and Catskill Indians were strong allies, but were under their official protection. And so, they were offered land to live on by them in the Upper Susquehanna River Valley and many of them were beginning to move there and they were just seeking some help from the British government for that.

Brett Barry  13:58  
And so, the Lenape eventually ended up where?

Justin Wexler  14:01  
All over the place. Two groups in Oklahoma, Delaware Nation, out near Anadarko in the western part of the state and Delaware Tribe in Eastern Oklahoma near Bartlesville. They're mostly descended from Lenape people of New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania, but have ancestry also from throughout the Catskills and Hudson Valley. The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians; their tribal government is the directly descended tribal government from the Mohican people once located on Schodack Island that was their center of government until the late 1740s when they shifted to the mission of Stockbridge and their land in Western Massachusetts and the government of the Wappinger people are whopping on the east bank of the Hudson River mostly; really the descendants of native people who are living in the Bronx and Manhattan also joined Stockbridge for the most part. And so, they're out in Wisconsin today near the Menominee Reservation, and then the native people who are living in the Catskills, the Esopus and Catskill Indians, as well as the Munsees from the Upper Delaware River and there are many other Lenape neighbors. They mostly ended up in Ontario around 1780 and they've been there ever since and largely the same places on the Grand River and out in Muncie and Moraviantown, which is closer to Detroit.

Brett Barry  15:20  
Have you had interactions with them?

Justin Wexler  15:22  
Yes, I visited twice out of Ontario. We're planning another trip soon and we're also planning on visiting friends in the Stockbridge-Mohican community in Wisconsin next summer. My wife and Anna and I have made friends in, really, in all five of their communities that have governments basically, so we regularly host Lenape people and Mohican people visiting their homeland. For our overnight stays, you know, members of their communities don't have to pay. They stay for free. I mean, well over half of our booked up nights are Lenape people and Mohican people visiting their homeland and we also organize with other organizations in the region. As an example, we've arranged with the Hudson River Maritime Museum to take groups of Lenape people visiting their homeland out on boat tours on the Solaris solar-powered boat a few times we've arranged, so that a women-led group coming with their families in a couple of weeks. We'll be taking them down to Norrie Point and they'll ... they'll get to go out into wetlands and the Hudson River and canoes. We do a lot of work like that. It's funny because when I was a teenager, I was obsessed with reading about the go-betweens that were very, very important between colonial governments and the native peoples of the region in the 18th century who were a mix of native people and non-native people who kind of had to have a foot in both worlds and I feel like ... I've kind of become the 21st century version of a go-between somehow, but I did not see that coming, but ... right now, one of the biggest issues Lenape people are facing today is the rise of individuals and groups claiming to be them who have no documented links to them at all and who are sometimes [unfortunately] given resources including money and land by well meaning organizations that are meant for actual Lenape people. You know, they've taken advantage of this vacuum where the native inhabitants of the region have not been here for so long that the current inhabitants here are kind of, you know, mean well, but are easily tricked by people pretending to be native and that's really actually a serious problem right now. It's just complicated, you know, with their questions of land back all the time by land trusts and other organizations in the region. But for Lenape people and Mohican people today, you know, they've now have had roots in their current locations for over 200 years and very few people are willing to just leave where they grew up and leave their extended families and friends as important as their homeland is and as powerful of a spiritual connection as they have with the lens here. I don't know whether we're ever going to have a large group move back, but you never know and I think it would be really nice. I'd be happy to help out with that.

Brett Barry  18:15  
And he'd be well equipped to do so. Wild Hudson Valley's Eco Camp is already hosting immersive overnight stays on a property that Justin and Anna are actively managing with a focus on medicinal plants and fruit-bearing trees. Stay tuned for more about that. Plus, Justin's thoughts on land acknowledgments: Catskills place names and their meanings, and a surprising theory about the very word ... "Catskills." Kaatscast is sponsored by the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com; and by the 52-mile Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway; following New York State Route 28 through the heart of the Central Catskills. For maps, itineraries, and links to area restaurants, shops, and accommodations, visit sceniccatskills.com. Back at Wild Hudson Valley's Eco Camp in Cairo, New York, Justin Wexler explained how Wild Hudson Valley came to be and its connection to the Catskill Mountains indigenous past.

Justin Wexler  19:36  
I started Wild Hudson Valley in 2013 with the idea of working full-time in environmental education with a focus on the human relationship with the land and learning from the people who lived here sustainably for generations, so to inspire people today to be better stewards of the land. In the past few years, my wife [Anna] and I decided it was time to teach on our own land that property belongs to Anna's family. You know, we had been teaching with other organizations between New York City and Saratoga County and all the way out to Western Delaware County. We still are. But we're also hosting people here and we've provided a space for people to have immersive overnight stays where we do programming all weekend long and also host workshops and host native people here who are visiting their homeland or just want to teach; and, you know, we're also actively managing the landscape here for native plant species. We've planted over 150 species to enrich what is already growing here. We have a focus on growing native perennial fruit and nut crops like wild plums and we've worked very, very hard on keeping the deer population at low healthy numbers, which is a real challenge because there are no real natural predators of deer in the area. So, we're trying to maintain the landscape in a way that would make it healthier environmentally, but also a better place for Lenape people to visit with more access to the plant medicines and foods traditional to them. Native people in the Catskill Mountains were one of the last groups to leave their homeland and it happened in one step basically. So, the American Revolution came. Many of their neighbors were not interested in involvement in the war and neither were they, but harassment by rebel rangers and committees of safety out of places like Kingston; drove them to the cause of loyalism to the crown. Not necessarily because they cared about the British crown, but it was in their best interest and for their protection. So, their towns were burned out by the Continental Army in two campaigns in the late 1770s. They ended up as refugees in Fort Niagara; and by 1783, there are records of Esopus Indian people and probably Catskill Indians with them, moving out to the Grand River and Ontario. That's where the British crown would purchase a million acres from the Mississaugas and give it to their loyal native allies including the Six Nations who had largely were loyal to the crown during the American Revolution and the British Indian Department was obligated to them. And so, they live in communities in Ontario today because of that. So, they basically moved there in one step. Very different than the Mohican people who, you know, they didn't go directly from here to Wisconsin. They first moved out to Oneida, New York, then some ended up in Indiana, then in Michigan, and in several places in Wisconsin. The Oklahoma Lenape had even more of a travel over multiple generations. So, it's unique that native people from the Catskills went directly to Ontario and are living today in an ecosystem that's not very different from their homeland. They're close to the Onondaga limestone belt that also exists here in Ulster County and Greene County and would have been important to their ancestors here because of the veins of chert found in it.

Brett Barry  23:13  
Another quick aside ... chert is a hard fine-grained silica rock that American Indians used to make tools and points or arrowheads.

Justin Wexler  23:23  
And the tree species and animals and fish are almost the same out there. So, they've been able to retain traditional knowledge about medicines and hunting and fishing methods that could not be retained in the same way by Lenape people who ended up in Oklahoma, let's say, because the environment is so different. One elder that I know he sets fire to his yard every year to encourage morel mushrooms to grow there and I just love that that's on a microscale of what his ancestors were doing here setting fire to their hunting grounds periodically in order to enhance the species diversity and make better habitat for deer elk turkeys on the other game they were hunting. We know they were doing infected forest composition today in the Catskills shows where there settlements where Michael Kudish has, you know, talked and written a lot about this. He has discovered, you know, the tree species composition he's found that his fire dependent; you can overlay on a map of where their settlements were in the 18th century. So, what we're seeing today even with all the clearing for Hemlock tanneries and pastures and charcoal, the trees that came back still reflect the native people who lived here 250 years ago and that's ... to me an astounding legacy to leave behind that. Your impact on the environment [positive impact] was so huge that even with the environmental destruction of the past 200+ years, the forest still reflects their land management methods and is visible today from a car window.

Brett Barry  25:00  
Tree distribution is not the only legacy the Lenape left behind. I asked Justin about their Algonquian language and some of the Catskills place names that resulted from it.

Justin Wexler  25:11  
I started working with vocabularies that had been created by the Moravian missionaries in the 18th century to better understand their culture through their language. Algonquian languages are extremely different from Indo-European languages like English. They're polysynthetic languages, so basically you're putting together morphemes or sound with meaning to create an entire sentence or two in one word and virtually all the place names found in the Catskill Mountains and regions around today come from either a dialect of the Mohican language that was spoken by the Catskill Indians or a dialect of the Munsee language that would have been spoken by the Esopus Indians and both of these dialects of two different languages are very closely related. I compare the two to Spanish versus Portuguese. They share enough vocabulary and grammar that they could basically understand each other with some work. Only in the past 10 years have I started working with their language departments, which has greatly improved my pronunciation. I was forced to get audio recordings 15-20 years ago, just so I could hear what it sounded like; and again, you have to remember the dialects that were spoken in the Catskills are no longer spoken today; and in fact, the Mohican language has not been spoken as a first language since 1940 and the Munsee language today is only spoken by one elder [Dianne Snake] and the Moraviantown Reserve in Ontario. There are second language speakers in their communities, but I think she just turned 82 or 83, a month or two ago, and she's the last first-language speaker.

When a friend of ours [Kristin Jacobs] was visiting this past summer to help with a soundwalk project and also to do a few presentations of her own here, we took her up into the Catskills to Kaaterskill Falls and she was looking at a map on ... in a kiosk of the Catskill Mountains and she immediately was noticing all the place names and she was translating them. That's not always easy to do because they're frequently very garbled today. They been changed over the centuries and are not necessarily. They don't look like how they should be. They were not written correctly. But I'll give you some Catskill Mountain place name examples where we know the meanings, so Shandaken, which is when she saw immediately in a map been translated correctly, the morpheme shinned in it ... refers to hemlock trees. It can also be used for any cedar species or evergreen, but originally it was for Eastern hemlocks. So, Shandaken would mean an area with a creek flowing through a huge number of hemlock trees. I'll give another example. Pepacton; their name for the East Branch of the Delaware River was Péepakang. Any Munsee speaker today in Ontario would immediately know what that word meant. If you went to the Moraviantown or Munsee Reserve in Ontario today and asked someone for some Papakong, they would get it for you immediately ... that sweet flag root, which is a very important medicine root for them today in their communities. And so, they were calling it something like Papakong [unintelligible], which means the sweet flag river. Maybe because a lot of sweet flag grows around its banks where they had their main community back in the day there.

Brett Barry  28:33  
Esopus?

Justin Wexler  28:34  
Esopus is fun. The earliest records for Esopus come from a map, I think, from 1616 and that's before there was even any real settlement. There were only a few traders coming up from mostly from the Netherlands and someone must have asked ... what the name of the creek was they were standing on? Could have been Esopus Creek? It could have been the Rondout and the native person might have said "Mecebush," which means the river creek. Síipuw in Munsee means river; and with a diminutive ending, it's Nú shíipoosh (or shiipóoshush) which means a smaller river or creek and the Dutch soon applied that name to the Rondout and the Esopus and I think even the Wallkill. They differentiated them. One was the [krot] Esopus. One was the [kline] Esopus. Anyone who speaks Dutch probably pronouncing that incorrectly, but the native people living on those small tributaries of the Hudson came to be called the Esopus Indians because of it. It just means river or the small river.

Brett Barry  29:31  
And with apologies to Kaatscast Episode Two about the Dutch influence on Catskills place names, Justin has a theory that the very word Catskills is at least half-Algonquian and maybe not even named for our famous wildcats.

Justin Wexler  29:49  
The word, "Catskill," itself. I am strongly of the belief comes from a native person, so we don't see the word ... "Catskill" until 1630s or 1640s. But during that same era, there was a local leader from the Catskill Indian group whose listed once under the name 'cat' and another time it's "ConCom" in the Dutch records of the 1640s and 1650s and the Dutch regularly named creeks, rivers, and places after prominent native leaders. In fact, the stream flowing by us here the Jan de Bakker's Kill is named for multiple generations of Catskill Indian leaders in the 17th and 18th century. So, it's likely that Catskill is just describing the Catskill Creek as a creek where that leader Kat or Kaankat lived. Later, the mountains got named after the creek because they're behind the area where Catskill is today or, you know, very visible from the Hudson River. I strongly think that's the origin of the name.

Brett Barry  29:49  
So, "Kill" is still the Dutch part.

Justin Wexler  30:57  
Yes, I should have mentioned that. Yep. So, wherever the Dutch people settled, you're still seeing "Kill" for moving bodies of water. It's not used in modern standard Dutch with the same meaning, but in the 17th century, "Kill" was used to refer to running streams or rivers. So, it's redundant to say ... "Catskill Creek," and there are actually a few place names where the native name has the suffix or creek in it, and then there's "Kill," and then "Creek" or "Brook," so you have "River" three times in a row.

Brett Barry  31:27  
I'm sure we'll get a phone call or two about that theory. So, we may as well add another bit of controversy to the mix. I asked Justin about the ever growing trend that is the land acknowledgement. If you've attended a conference or been on a college campus anytime recently, you're likely familiar with this public statement about the particular native people who inhabited that place. Nice idea, but is it meaningful or just performative? We put the question to Justin.

Justin Wexler  31:56  
The majority of native people that I've talked to about land acknowledgments. They find them to be performative or even annoying. The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians; they've created a land acknowledgement for organizations in their homeland to use because they get so inundated by requests for land acknowledgments that ... and helping craft in one that they just created a portion of their website. I regularly direct people to that. I understand the purpose of land acknowledgments, but the argument I hear by native peoples out there empty. I've heard the analogy. It's like ... imagine if someone came in and took your bag from you, and then acknowledged to everybody that ... that bag belongs to you, while keeping the bag. You know, they prefer meaningful connection and most people, I know, are happy to help an organization create a land acknowledgement. I mean it's better than not happening at least people are acknowledging their existence. That's the other problem is how they're made because sometimes land acknowledgments are very focused on the past and forget that they still exist as people today.

Brett Barry  33:06  
So, meaningful relationships, interaction ... how can we do that?

Justin Wexler  33:11  
That is the other question, you know, who do you connect with? Are you connecting with official representatives from a tribal government or just with individuals and how do you do that and for what purpose? I think on the level of an organization, let's say, a land trust or historical society or even, you know, a municipality. It's much easier to offer something; whether that be invite people to come stay and pay for their travels and, you know, show them something connected with their ancestors in your community archives or take them out to a protected space and offer that space to them, so that they can harvest medicinal plants there or find things that are of importance to them. I don't know. I feel like ... my work, which really is focused on reconstructing the pre-contact landscape and the region and understanding the native peoples relationship with the land here. How they shaped the diversity of species here and how it shapes their culture and their folklore? Rather than it be exploitive. I see myself as being in a privileged position that I got to grow up in their ancestral land and have the time and resources to devote much of my time to doing that. And so, for me, that's my way of giving back is, you know, I provide this research to them to their language and revitalization departments and host them and direct them to other organizations. I can't say what that relationship would look like for other people or organizations. I think it would differ from group to group and honestly their tribal governments are often so inundated there, you know, the departments that work with cultural affairs or history are so overwhelmed with requests from their homeland that it can take months for people to get back. So, while it's preferable to land acknowledgments, it's something that you have to be patient with because it can take years to form relationships.

Brett Barry  35:08  
Say, people want to research this more or learn more about it. Are there any resources now available or tell us what you're working on that's going to be available?

Justin Wexler  35:15  
So, I'm writing a small, relatively short book that it's basically a history of ... focus mostly on the Catskill Indians in the Northern Catskills, but also on the Esopus Indians because their histories are so deeply intertwined and they amalgamated together as a people and their descendants are descended from both peoples today and it's going to be a book describing their way of life; specifically on the Catskill Mountains and their history over the past 400 years. Utilizing their oral histories as much as possible and primarily based on many unpublished ethnographic field notes and maps, surveys, diaries, etc., that are not known to the public today and I'm going to be having that looked at before it's published. I want it to be reviewed by their descendants and have all the vocabulary, people's names, etc. looked at, so we have a better idea of what they mean. That'll come out in the next year or two hopefully. Otherwise, the only book I can really recommend is "The Memory of All Ancient Customs" by ... I don't know how to say his name. It looks Scandinavian. Tom Midtrød, I think. It is probably the best book out there; describing native peoples in the Hudson Valley and Catskills and how they dealt with the colonial governments that came to dominate their homeland over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. Anything by Shirley Dunn is pretty good for the Northern Catskills. She really focuses on land deeds, but they're ... they really valuable sources of information and if you like more scholarly work, there are a few more academic books, so honestly rather than just list them all here. If any listeners are interested in resources, you can always get in touch with me and I'm happy to send PDFs of available or direct YouTube books that you can buy and I can be reached through our website: wildhudsonvalley.com.