Bradley Pitts, Chair of the Mohican Allyship Committee of the Copake Town Board, shows a slide demarcating the Mohican ancestral homelands during his lecture, “Mohican Heritage: Past, Present, and Future,” at the Roeliff Jansen Historical Society in Copake Falls on March 17.
COPAKE — Bradley Pitts, Chair of the Town of Copake’s newly established Mohican Allyship Committee, opened the lecture “Mohican Heritage: Past Present, and Future” at the Roeliff Jansen Historical society in Copake Falls on Sunday, March 17 with the question, “What is land acknowledgement?”
Patty Krawec, author of “Becoming Kin” and a member of the Anishnaabe people, has written:
“Land acknowledgements are a moment to pause and reflect on the relationship that exists between the current residents and those who were displaced.” She asks, “What does it mean to live on stolen land? You may not be guilty of the act of dispossession, but it is a relationship you have inherited.”
The recent history of the Mohicans (The People of the Waters that Are Never Still) is one of repeated displacement and dispossession by European settlers.
In 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson, the Mohican lands stretched “across six states from Southwest Vermont, the entire Hudson River Valley of New York, from Lake Champlain to Manhattan, western Massachusetts up to the Connecticut River Valley, northwest Connecticut, and portions of Pennsylvania and New Jersey,” writes Dorothy Davids her “Brief History of the Mohican Nation.”
Pitts stressed that for Indigenous people, land ownership is a European settler concept and is far different from how Indigenous people regard the land. When 17th- or 18th-century Mohicans they signed a deed or sold land, they did not expect to never be allowed to return to it. They expected it to be shared as land had always been shared, that they could still hunt, fish, and travel through it. Instead, they were pushed into smaller and smaller territories while the European settlers built houses, farms, and towns on the lands they had once cared for.
In the 1660s, as the colonies grew, the Mohicans were being “squeezed from east and west.”
By 1734, many Mohicans were located near the Housatonic River in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They allowed missionaries to build a church and school, but after the Revolutionary War, which Mohicans faught alongside the colonists, they returned to find that their lands near the Housatonic had been taken through “debt and mortgage and often fraudulent means” and also that “plans had already been made to remove them from Stockbridge.”
In the 1780s, many moved to New Stockbridge, New York, at the invitation of the Oneidas. They again settled and built homes and planted crops, and after several years, European immigrants again moved north, claimed the land, and forced further displacement.
This scenario played out again and again with the Mohicans. By the 1820s, much of the tribe had moved to Kaukauna, Wisconsin; by the 1840s, to land near Lake Winnebago.
In 1856, they signed a treaty with the Menominee Nation for access to the land where they remain today, which is located in Shawano County, Wisconsin. Today, nown as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, there are “approximately 1500 enrolled Tribal members, about a third of whom live on the Wisconsin Reservation.”
Another concept that sometimes means different things to settlers’ inheritors and Indigenous people is the concept of “land back.”
An example of Land Back took place in 2023 on Monument Mountain, where 351 acres of land were returned to the Mohican people. This was made possible by the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program (MVP), which, explained Pitts, “provides local communities with funding and technical assistance to implement climate resilience projects.”
Shannon Holsey, Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans President, has explained that the Land Back movement is not “trying to reclaim land from ownership in a Western colonial way of thinking about it.”
The Stockbridge Munsee people, she continued, are interested in reclaiming “ways of being, which were never based on money.” The meaning of ancestral land, she said, exceeds capitalist concepts of ownership; land back is about “reclamation of our kinship systems, our governance systems, our ceremony and spirituality, our language, our culture, and our food and medicinal systems,” all of which “are based on our relationships to the land.”
She emphasized that the movement is also about stewardship, and “making sure that we do whatever we can in a collaborative way to protect it for future generations.”
The Indigenous ways of land management and stewardship that will be used on Monument Mountain will benefit the environment, and is believed that such stewardship practices could also help combat global warming.
Patty Krawec wrote about Land Back in “Becoming Kin”: “We cannot talk about restoring our relationship to the land without talking about restoring the land to relationship with the people from whom it was taken. […] Unable to imagine any scenario other than what settler colonialism unleashed on us, people assume that Land Back means evictions, relocations, and elimination. […] But wholesale eviction was never what we intended. Remember, from the earliest treaties, we offered a way to live together in peace, friendship, and respect.”
LAKEVILLE — Stephen S. Myers, 82, of Lakeville, (formerly of New York City, Almond, New York, Kane’ohe, Hawaii, and Fair Oaks, California) passed away peacefully at his home on Nov. 30, 2024. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth “Betsy” (Phelan), his two sons Matthew and Shepherd, two nephews and three nieces.
Stephen was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, on Oct. 29, 1942, the son of the late Elwood Mosman and Donnie Marguerite Myers. Growing up in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, Stephen struggled with dyslexia in multiple high schools, ultimately graduating from Avon Old Farms High School in Avon, Connecticut.
Before attending Pratt Institute, he lived in a beach shack Shelter Island for a year and remembered this as a time when “you could walk the beach and eat the fish.” At Pratt he met his wife, Betsy, and helped to establish photography as a major there with the assistance of his friend Robert Mapplethorpe. As one of the first wave of artists to move to the Cast Iron District in Lower Manhattan, he and Betsy renovated a 3,200 square-foot loft and became one of many artists illegally living in the Soho loft spaces. They ran a photo studio for commercial clients, as well as doing street photography, including a role as the club photographer for the Alien Nomads’ MC or Motorcycle Club (which later became the New York City Hells Angels Chapter). He was a major contributor to New Journalism in New York City with Milton Glaser and Clay Felker during the 1960’s and 1970’s. His investigative photojournalism was featured in major stories about media figures along with current events in New York City and upstate New York. He documented multiple artists, musicians and notable persons (including Jim Morrison and The Doors, Sly and The Family Stone, Eddie Egan, Russell Means, Dennis Banks, John Lee Hooker, and Count Basie) from the Sixties to the present.
In the late 1970’s Stephen and Betsy relocated to Western New York where he continued his photography work full time, including becoming a field tester for Eastman Kodak’s pre-production professional films and papers, as well as photos in the ad campaigns to introduce the product to the marketplace. His North Coast Native American mask photography for the American Museum of Natural History was used extensively across dozens of publications. He was a runner-up for the 1998 Ellie National Magazine Award for his LIFE Magazine article about his plant photography in which he was featured.
In 1988 Stephen and his wife led a grassroots resistance campaign, with the help of physicist Theodore “Ted” Taylor and the local community, against the New York State government over a proposed low-level radioactive dump. Rallying everyone from hardscrabble farmers, the sheriff, political leaders, academics, media, and even the members of the local Mennonite community, they were able to increase their ranks and bring many disparate groups together. At one point Stephen read the Declaration of Independence to an audience of over 5,000 at a county-wide meeting. He considered this day, and the fact that the entire campaign remained a form of nonviolent protest, to be among his greatest accomplishments. This activism led to a U.S. Supreme Court challenge, New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992), which is the first enduring challenge of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They were able not only to stop construction of the dump, but also to change how the federal government would handle the disposal and containment of such waste for future generations.
His work was published in LIFE Magazine, New York Magazine, Esquire, Playboy, Fortune, A.D. Magazine, New Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Natural History Magazine, VIVA Magazine, Seventeen, Audience Magazine, Working Woman, National Lampoon, The Saturday Review, and NOVA. Prints of his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Fenimore Art Museum, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, George Eastman House, the Robert L. Pfannebecker Collection, the Almond Historical Society Archives, American Museum of Natural History, Robert Sobieszek Collection, Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, George Eastman House, the Sidney Clark Collection at Avon Old Farms, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) Collection, and Kroch Library’s Rare Manuscript Collections at Cornell University.
After raising his children in Western New York State, he and Betsy lived in various places before returning to the Northeast. Stephen had a lifelong passion and love for woodworking, painting (oil & watercolor), restoring antiques, attending estate sales and flea markets, listening to music, and riding his bicycle with his sons.
WEST CORNWALL — Ella L. Clark, 83, a social worker, writer, and lover of nature and the Post Office, died Nov. 7, 2024 at Vassar Brothers Hospital in Poughkeepsie, after an acute stroke. Her family was with her in her last week.
Ella was predeceased by her parents, Benjamin S. and Charlotte L. Clark, her brother, Benjamin Clark, and her sister Tib Clark. Ella is survived by her daughter, Cristina Mathews of Fort Bragg, California, and her husband Jason and son Milo, her son Alexander Mathews, of Newton, Massachusetts, and his wife Olivia and children Ariana, Damian, and Torey, her daughter Jessica Meyer, of Pacific Palisades, California, and her husband Tim and children Ione and Nikos; and her sister Charlotte de Bresson of Paris.
Ella was born in New York City on Dec. 23, 1940. She was educated at Milton Academy and Radcliffe College. She married Richard Mathews in 1965; soon after, they traveled more than a thousand miles down the Yukon River. After building a house in Amenia, they moved, with their two children, Alexander and Cristina, then 2 and 3, onto a fishing boat, and fished commercially, first in southeast Alaska for salmon, and then up and down the West Coast for albacore.
In fall 1972, Ella moved on shore with the children, and her marriage ended. In Point Reyes Station, California, she found a close community of artists and carpenters and became involved in community projects. With Jonathon Meyer she had her third child, Jessica.
Ella moved back East in 1983, landing in Sharon. She was an EMT on the Sharon volunteer ambulance crew, and worked at Oblong Books in Millerton.
Ella’s real career began in 1988, when she began working for the town of Sharon as a social worker. For 31 years, she threw herself into the work, focusing especially on affordable housing, health services, and fuel assistance. Ella founded several organizations, including the Chore Service and the Sharon Community Foundation. She served on various boards and commissions, including the Sharon Hospital Board and the Cornwall Conservation Board. Ella was delighted to be named the Grange Citizen of the Year in 2007.
Ella was a prolific correspondent and writer. Ella enjoyed research, number crunching, and analysis to support grant applications and reports. She was a frequent Cornwall Chronicle contributor, often writing about the natural world, always choosing interesting, non-obvious topics. She loved digging into archives, getting the facts and voices right, and winnowing down what she had learned to the compact size the Chronicle demanded.
Ella moved to West Cornwall in 1991. Firmly rooted on Town Street, she “loved bird watching, taking photos of bears, smoking cigarettes after dinner, fighting for equity for all people, and putting orange peels on top of the fireplace,” as her granddaughter Ariana remembers.
A celebration of Ella’s life will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 19, 2025, at the Cornwall Village Meeting House, 8 Bolton Hill Road, Cornwall, Connecticut.
SALISBURY — David Graeme Townsend was born July 23, 1930, in Mineola, New York, to Rachel Townsend (Maxtone-Graham) and Greenough Townsend. David and his older brother Antone grew up in New York City and Long Island. Some of his early life was spent in Scotland in his mother’s family home, Cultoquhey, which is near Perth in the Highlands. Here he enjoyed summers with all his Maxtone-Graham cousins. Many of these cousins would remain close with David for his entire life. One cousin, Charles Smythe, even came to America to live with David and his family during the war where Charles became like a brother to David and Antone. David went to St. George’s in Newport, Rhode Island for a while and then on to Lawrenceville in New Jersey. He finished high school at the Basil Patterson School in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Immediately after high school, David enrolled in the US Marine Corps and served two tours in the Korean War. He was always very proud of his military service. After his service David attended the Sorbonne University in Paris for two years and then the University of Madrid for one year. Even though David never finished his formal education, he always remained an avid student of history and language. In his travels his skill with foreign languages was sometimes a problem because he spoke with such a good accent that it was sometimes falsely assumed that he was fluent.
David always believed that travel was important in life. One of his great trips was in the 1950s when he rode from England to Turkey on his motorcycle. Throughout his life travel with his friends and family created many fond memories. Eventually he returned to New York City, where he worked for various Wall Street firms and H&R Block. There he became skilled as an investor, which would serve him well throughout his life.
In 1958, at a party in Manhattan searching for a bathroom, David serendipitously found himself in the adjacent apartment. There he found the love of his life Helen Gaylord. David and Helen dated for a couple of years before getting married Nov. 12, 1960 in Rockford, Illinois. For the next 14 years they lived and worked in New York City. Sheila was born in 1963, and Lila followed in 1967. In 1963 they bought an old Connecticut farmhouse in Amesville, from David’s aunt, who had owned the property for forty years. The home, fondly called River House due to its proximity to the Housatonic River, was used as a weekend and summer house until 1974 when the family moved to Connecticut permanently. Helen and David would live at River House for 54 years and became fixtures in the Amesville community. Over the years, David was involved in various ventures: owning a model train store, operating six vacation cottages by the Housatonic River, and buying and selling land. He also continued to work in the investment world well into his nineties. David loved country life and developed many lifelong passions. He learned to ski at 44, built and sailed iceboats, fly fished, water skied on the local lakes, constructed an elaborate model railroad in his basement, and hiked with his dogs on the nearby Appalachian Trail. David and Helen always had at least two dogs and a few cats as well as guinea pigs and fish at one time!
David always loved boats and trains. His first boat was called Moonraker and was kept on Long Island. Daystrar was a small water ski boat he used on Twin Lakes and took on summer camping trips to Lake George and Thousand Islands, New York. He moved on to a Grand Banks Cabin Cruiser in the mid-1980s. He named the boat La Bayadere (a famous ballet) in tribute to Helen, who was a dancer. He would embark on many adventures in this boat up and down the East Coast from Mystic, Connecticut to Bar Harbor, Maine. His most ambitious trip took him to the northern end of Labrador, Canada in 1992. David enlisted many friends and family members to “crew the boat”. He also helped a man on the West Coast captain his boat, Grocery Boy, from Seattle to Alaska, again including many friends and family members to assist with the journey. His final boat was a smaller one called Swallow that he kept near his house in Bath, Maine. Trains were another passion of David’s. He went on many trips by train and enjoyed driving around with his “train nut” friends simply to watch passing trains. His daughters remember being forced to picnic in a garbage dump on a western road trip just to catch a glimpse of an oncoming train! David and Helen continued to travel well into their eighties with France and Scotland being favorite destinations but also more exotic locations like Patagonia. They also loved spending time with their granddaughters Claire and Danika Nimlos and attended all their high school and college graduations as well as many soccer games and concerts.
In 2017 David and Helen moved to Falmouth, Maine permanently to be near family. Helen preceded David in death December 24, 2022. In November 2023, David went on one final cruise up the East Coast to Nova Scotia at the age of 93 on the Serenade of the Seas with son-in-law (Mark Nimlos), close friends (Doug Saksa/Steve Ann and Mark Corrigan), and his caregiver (Shelly).
On November 17, 2024, David died peacefully at his home in Falmouth, Maine with family and his rescue cat Nala by his side. He is survived by daughters; Lila Portland, Maine and Sheila (Mark Nimlos), Golden, Colorado; granddaughters Claire Nimlos (Peter Nimlos), Arvada, Colorado and Danika Nimlos, Pasadena, California; brother Antone Townsend, Highlands Ranch, Colorado; niece Maggie Townsend, Highlands Ranch, Colorado, Goddaughter Elspeth Hilbert, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and California family; Joan, Hunt, Corie, Riette (Ralph Fallant), and Sean Burdick, Redwood City, California.
A memorial will be held Oct. 11, 2025, in Falls Village, time and place to be announced.
Donations in lieu of flowers can be sent to: Great Mountain Forest, 10 Station Place, P.O. Box 534 Norfolk, CT 06058 greatmountainforest.org
Please visit www.lindquistfuneralhome.com to view David’s tribute page and to sign his online guestbook.
EAST CANAAN — Richard George Ralph, 84, a beloved father, grandfather, and friend, passed away peacefully on Dec. 4, 2024, at his home in East Canaan, surrounded by his family. Born on Sept. 23, 1940, in Cornwall, Connecticut, he was the son of the late Marie (Kennedy) Ralph Negri and George Yeaton Ralph Jr.
Richard was the proud owner and operator of Richard Ralph and Son Rubbish Removal for many years. Known for his strong work ethic and reliability, he built a trusted business that served the community. After his retirement, his son Richard took over the reins, continuing the family tradition. Richard’s friendly demeanor meant that there weren’t many in the area who didn’t know him, and all were met with warm greetings and hearty waves.
Richard was known for his love of guitar playing and singing. From a young age, music was his lifelong passion. His vibrant presence could often be found at celebrations and events, where he would eagerly get up with the band and sing a song. Richard’s enthusiasm for music brought joy to everyone around him.
He leaves behind his children; daughter Leona Riley and her husband William of Clayton, North Carolina, and son Richard Ralph and his wife Joel of East Canaan. Affectionately known as “Papa Richard,” he is also survived by seven grandchildren; Holli (Riley) Dunlavey and her husband Jeff, Kristen (Riley) Ford and her husband Jon, Ashley (Riley) Riva and her husband Tyler, Ashley Chance, Jessica (Ralph) King and her husband Jordan, Justin Ralph and his fiancée Taylor Wheeler, and Lauren Ralph, as well as sixteen great-grandchildren.
Richard is also survived by three siblings; Donna (Ralph) Roux of Canaan, Stanley Ralph of Lakeville, and David Ralph of Salisbury, along with many nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents, his beloved wife of nearly 50 years, Cecelia (Tanner) Ralph, his brother Burton Veronesi, and his sisters Valerie (Ralph) Poley and Virginia (Ralph) Cables.
Services will be private at the family’s request. The Ralph family would like to extend their heartfelt gratitude to all who shared in Richard’s life, and they invite all who knew him to celebrate his memory with a donation to the Canaan VFW Couch Pipa Post 6851, 104 South Canaan Road, Canaan, CT 06018.
