Photo: Katie Orlinsky.
“On Long Island [in New York state] a group of Shinnecock women are nursing a bay back to health and, in the process, reclaiming traditions,” writes the magazine Nature.
A couple nonprofits and a few indigenous women are putting into practice one of my favorite principles: “Two and two and 50 make a million.” They are saving their small piece of the ocean from pollution and helping to bring back a better world.
Claudia Geib writes at Nature, “Danielle Hopson Begun stands waist-deep in the waveless expanse of Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay. She reaches into the water and lifts out a heavy rope, which drips with the amber and butterscotch-colored fronds of a marine plant called sugar kelp. It’s early June, and over the past eight months this kelp, anchored here, has grown from millimeter-long seedlings into foot-long golden ribbons, absorbing nitrogen and carbon from the water in the process.
“Tended by Hopson Begun and four other women from the Shinnecock Indian Nation, these lines are part of the first Indigenous-owned kelp farm on the U.S. East Coast. The kelp is harvested each year and sold locally as a natural fertilizer. But for these women, who have formed a nonprofit organization called Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, it has become something more than a crop: It is one piece of a multifront effort to reassert ancestral ties to the lands and waters their community has stewarded for thousands of years.
“Today, though, Shinnecock Bay is drastically different from the waters their ancestors once harvested wild kelp from. It’s more polluted, and the waters have grown warmer and more acidic. And almost every year since starting the farm in 2020, Hopson Begun and her partners have found their lines coated in an alga that suffocates and kills baby kelp. It significantly reduced part of their harvests — until now.
“To combat the algae, the kelp farmers have turned to cutting-edge science and technological solutions — supported by a grant from The Nature Conservancy and industry expertise from aquaculture nonprofit GreenWave — to supplement their long connection to the bay.
“ ‘There is this traditional knowledge that we have — of how the seaweed grows in the bay, and how to nurture it and prepare it for the work that it has to do,’ says Tela Troge, one of the group’s founders. If the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers can successfully grow kelp in the bay — weaving this ancestral understanding with modern science — the plant stands to help restore an ancient link to a cultural practice, while perhaps helping stem the rising tide of pollution that has invaded these waters since the arrival of colonialism.
“Among the challenges of farming kelp is simply finding the time. The kelp farmers and their friends and families — mothers, lawyers, counselors, activists — live and work in the communities of the greater Long Island and New York City area. Today about half of the nearly 1,600 enrolled members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation live on a 900-acre property on the eastern edge of Shinnecock Bay — a property surrounded by wealthy Hamptons enclaves and just a barrier island away from the Atlantic Ocean.
“Life here has always been intertwined with water. For at least 10,000 years, the ‘People of the Stony Shore’ gathered fish, mussels, scallops and clams, and cultivated oyster gardens along a vast stretch of land and waters on and around what is now called Long Island. Skilled seafarers, they relied on the Shinnecock and Peconic Bays — both local inlets — as well as the open sea. They hunted whales and exchanged white and purple wampumpeag beads they carved from the shells of hard clams, or quahog. These beads, known as wampum, remain an important touchstone for the Shinnecock, who continue to carve them as jewelry and cultural symbols.
“When Europeans arrived in the Northeast in the 1600s, they brought diseases that decimated the Shinnecock and their neighbors, razed forests to sow farms and claimed burial grounds to build towns. Over time the Shinnecock Indian Nation lost access to most of their historic hunting and fishing grounds, retaining a territory of about 1,000 acres, including the 900-acre reservation. With the spread of new people, the waters the Shinnecock relied on changed, too.
“Shinnecock Bay, in particular, suffered. The bay spans 9,000 acres, separated from the Atlantic Ocean to the south by a narrow barrier island. Warm and shallow, with an average depth of only about 6 feet, the bay’s connection to the sea has shifted over the centuries as storms alternately carved and filled in cuts through the island. A powerful 1938 hurricane created Shinnecock Inlet, a permanent opening to the Atlantic. Yet, still largely landlocked, the bay’s waters concentrated high levels of nitrogen, which seeped through the ground from cesspools and septic systems as homes and towns sprung up along its shores.
“By the 1980s, annual nitrogen-fed algal blooms turned the water ‘brown like a cup of coffee,’ says Stony Brook University researcher Ellen Pikitch, one of the co-founders of the university’s Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program. These ‘brown tides’ clouded the water, blocking sunlight from reaching eelgrass, killing fish and destroying shellfish habitat. …
“By the mid-2000s the marine life that the Shinnecock people had once relied on was nearly gone. Oyster reefs vanished. Between the 1970s and 2011, the commercial fishery for quahogs, the clams used for Shinnecock wampum and food, collapsed by more than 99%.
“At the same time, members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation had been fighting to assert their ancestral land and water claims. In 2019, an ocean-farming nonprofit called GreenWave reached out to members of the Nation. Inspired by a PBS documentary about the Shinnecock people’s long battle against Southampton’s development, one of the group’s staffers wanted to know if members of the Nation would consider working with GreenWave on a kelp farm.
“The proposal captured the interest of the future Shinnecock Kelp Farmers for multiple reasons. They knew that, historically, the Shinnecock harvested seaweed for home insulation, food and medicine, and that kelp could absorb nitrogen and carbon into its tissues. When harvested and dried for garden fertilizer and used in place of traditional fertilizers, kelp offered a way to pull excess nutrients from the bay. …
“The Sisters of St. Joseph, a Catholic religious order, joined the collaboration by providing water access from their community center along Shinnecock Bay. In 2020, five Shinnecock women — Danielle Hopson Begun, Donna Collins-Smith, Rebecca Genia, Tela Troge and her mother, Darlene Troge — took up waders and began the work of nursing kelp to life.”
There’s a lot more at Nature, here. No paywall. Great photos.
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