To the Editor:
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. Our history is not distant. It is living. It is rooted in Indigenous, African, and Afro-Indigenous communities who navigated colonialism, enslavement, resistance, and survival in what became New York and Connecticut.
That is why the proposed development at Marshlands Conservancy in Westchester County should alarm anyone who cares about history, justice, or the environment.
We live in an era saturated with commemorations. The Dutch arrival. American independence. Emancipation. Each marked by plaques, panels, reenactments, and glossy articles. Yet at the same time, the physical evidence of Indigenous and African American life is being erased from the landscape. This contradiction is not accidental. It reflects a long-standing pattern in American public history.
At Marshlands Conservancy, a proposed project threatens one of the earliest known Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous burial grounds in the region, as well as gravesites and material culture associated with enslaved and Free People of Color. It also places at risk a historic animal cemetery that reflects Indigenous worldviews rooted in reciprocity between humans, animals, and land. As institutions rush to celebrate sanitized versions of the past, they quietly allow inconvenient histories to disappear.
Erasure is not new. It is cyclical.
In recent years, across political administrations and party lines, public history has increasingly been stripped of its racial and colonial context. Enslavement is softened into labor. Genocide is reframed as settlement. Critical scholarship is dismissed as divisive. What follows is a familiar retreat into comforting myths during moments of national anxiety.
We have seen this before. After the Civil War, the Lost Cause myth transformed enslavement into benevolence and rebellion into honor. Cemeteries, monuments, and textbooks worked together to rewrite the past. Today’s racial sanitization follows the same logic. When the present feels unstable, the past is rewritten to feel safe.
The debate over Marshlands Conservancy demonstrates how this operates locally. While people across the political spectrum have both supported and opposed the project, the underlying pattern of historical erasure persists regardless of party affiliation. Burial grounds remain vulnerable. Indigenous and African American presence remains negotiable.
This matters because burial grounds are not symbols. They are archives. They hold knowledge that no plaque or article can replace. To disturb them without full environmental, archaeological, and cultural review is not simply poor planning. It is an act of historical violence.
The presence of an animal cemetery deepens this concern. For many Indigenous cultures, animals are not property. They are relations. They are teachers. To erase animal burial sites alongside human ones is to erase Indigenous ecological knowledge itself, replacing it with a colonial hierarchy that values development over life.
Who controls the narrative controls the landscape. Recently published local historical articles illustrate how Revolutionary War myths continue to dominate public memory while Indigenous and African American lives are minimized or omitted. These narratives do not merely interpret the past. They justify present-day decisions about which histories deserve protection and which can be paved over.
Anniversaries can inspire reflection, but they can also distract from accountability. When celebration replaces reckoning, history becomes performance rather than responsibility.
Marshlands Conservancy is not just a local zoning issue. It is a test of whether we are willing to protect the physical evidence of the past, even when it complicates our stories. It asks whether anniversaries will continue to matter more than ancestors.
Erasure thrives when it goes unquestioned. Memory survives when it is defended.
–Teresa Vega
Letter: Stop the Marshlands Project
To the Editor:
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. Our history is not distant. It is living. It is rooted in Indigenous, African, and Afro-Indigenous communities who navigated colonialism, enslavement, resistance, and survival in what became New York and Connecticut.
That is why the proposed development at Marshlands Conservancy in Westchester County should alarm anyone who cares about history, justice, or the environment.
We live in an era saturated with commemorations. The Dutch arrival. American independence. Emancipation. Each marked by plaques, panels, reenactments, and glossy articles. Yet at the same time, the physical evidence of Indigenous and African American life is being erased from the landscape. This contradiction is not accidental. It reflects a long-standing pattern in American public history.
At Marshlands Conservancy, a proposed project threatens one of the earliest known Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous burial grounds in the region, as well as gravesites and material culture associated with enslaved and Free People of Color. It also places at risk a historic animal cemetery that reflects Indigenous worldviews rooted in reciprocity between humans, animals, and land. As institutions rush to celebrate sanitized versions of the past, they quietly allow inconvenient histories to disappear.
Erasure is not new. It is cyclical.
In recent years, across political administrations and party lines, public history has increasingly been stripped of its racial and colonial context. Enslavement is softened into labor. Genocide is reframed as settlement. Critical scholarship is dismissed as divisive. What follows is a familiar retreat into comforting myths during moments of national anxiety.
We have seen this before. After the Civil War, the Lost Cause myth transformed enslavement into benevolence and rebellion into honor. Cemeteries, monuments, and textbooks worked together to rewrite the past. Today’s racial sanitization follows the same logic. When the present feels unstable, the past is rewritten to feel safe.
The debate over Marshlands Conservancy demonstrates how this operates locally. While people across the political spectrum have both supported and opposed the project, the underlying pattern of historical erasure persists regardless of party affiliation. Burial grounds remain vulnerable. Indigenous and African American presence remains negotiable.
This matters because burial grounds are not symbols. They are archives. They hold knowledge that no plaque or article can replace. To disturb them without full environmental, archaeological, and cultural review is not simply poor planning. It is an act of historical violence.
The presence of an animal cemetery deepens this concern. For many Indigenous cultures, animals are not property. They are relations. They are teachers. To erase animal burial sites alongside human ones is to erase Indigenous ecological knowledge itself, replacing it with a colonial hierarchy that values development over life.
Who controls the narrative controls the landscape. Recently published local historical articles illustrate how Revolutionary War myths continue to dominate public memory while Indigenous and African American lives are minimized or omitted. These narratives do not merely interpret the past. They justify present-day decisions about which histories deserve protection and which can be paved over.
Anniversaries can inspire reflection, but they can also distract from accountability. When celebration replaces reckoning, history becomes performance rather than responsibility.
Marshlands Conservancy is not just a local zoning issue. It is a test of whether we are willing to protect the physical evidence of the past, even when it complicates our stories. It asks whether anniversaries will continue to matter more than ancestors.
Erasure thrives when it goes unquestioned. Memory survives when it is defended.
–Teresa Vega
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