Located on the ancestral homelands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck people, Forge Project is situated on a 60-acre campus in the Mahicannituck (Hudson River) valley. Forge affirms the self-determination of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community through programmatic commitments formalized in a Memorandum of Understanding, developed in partnership with the Stockbridge-Munsee Cultural Affairs Department and voted in by Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans’ Tribal Council, working to center cultural resurgence, relations, and by extension, the health of the land as a whole. Alongside this, Forge’s land remediation work, including restoration of woodland and meadow areas and the cultivation of plants with long relation to both the land and its peoples, is enacted with the hope of increased Indigenous presence in the region and the regeneration of Native land-based knowledge practices through access, consultation, and collaboration.
Over the course of a year, sustainability coach Rute Collaborative's support for Forge touched on various aspects of planning and programming, from helping Operations Director Paloma Wake set up an Energy Star Portfolio to move forward with a Frankenthaler Climate Initiative Scoping grant; working with Collections & Exhibition Director Amelia Russo to identify avenues for potential efficiency improvements in their collections work; and with Director of Relational Education Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yaktityutityu yaktiłhini) and Executive Director & Chief Curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) to put the organization’s guiding values down on paper, starting a document that can used to guide future work, including sustainability initiatives.
Through the year, Forge staff honed three central land-focused initiatives through Teiger climate funding support: the Land Relations Working group, meadow monitoring, and the hiring of a fundraising consultant with a focus on land. The Land Relations Working Group, a multi-year initiative for dialogue and exchange across ecological and cultural contexts, is facilitated by Jasmine Neosh (Menominee) and Sarah Biscarra Dilley as convenings focused on Native relationships to place, the endurance of our cultural practices, and strategies for collective land stewardship. Meadow Monitoring will inform year-to-year management decisions and create a baseline which, if the plant and insect monitoring were continued annually, would allow the organization to trace the development of the ecology improvements across time. Finally, to continue to move this work forward, a consultant with expertise and experience in resource mobilization, land back, and Indigenous land stewardship will join Forge to help direct how documentation and data collection can support case-making and dissemination of the dual land working group and ongoing remediation model.