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Driving up the steep gravel driveway at Forge Project—a nonprofit Indigenous arts initiative in Ancram, New York—first you see, then you hear, the landscape. In the late-summer sun, black-eyed Susans, shoulder-high goldenrods, and wispy native grasses appear to shimmer as they catch the light when the breeze ripples through. Open your car door and you hear the chirping of birds and buzzing of crickets, katydids, and bees.
Just a few years ago, the scenery at Forge was different: It was a neatly shorn lawn like you’d find in the suburbs. The ongoing transformation of that lawn into a biodiverse meadow is the result of Forge Project restoring the principles of Indigenous land stewardship to its 60-acre site. As beautiful as the meadow is today, aesthetics are secondary to the mission of the organization: Forge is committed to developing a mutually beneficial relationship between the land and the people who use it.
“This work is really meant to interrupt the ways that Western understandings of conservation often still reproduce an extractive relationship with the land rather than Indigenous worldviews that understand our interdependence with it,” said Sarah Biscarra Dilley, director of Indigenous programs and relationality at Forge and a member of the Northern Chumash tribe.
Forge is located on the ancestral lands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, a tribe that lived there until the United States government forced them to relocate multiple times in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, most people know the area as the Hudson Valley, one of the most influential regions in the United States with respect to instilling Eurocentric ideologies about land and landscape in the West. Here, artists like Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and other Hudson River School painters portrayed sublime landscapes that romanticized myths about untouched wilderness and national expansion. Meanwhile, European settlers clear-cut the region’s forests to supply timber and fuel and to make space for farming.
This history is expressly visible at Forge Project from the position of its headquarters—a residence that Ai Weiwei designed for an art collector in 2006. Most of the landscape around the house was either European lawn grass or hay (evidence of agriculture) with a few ornamental trees. Just beyond the home’s roughly 30-acre clearing is forest.
Earlier this year, Forge Project, which was founded in 2021, transitioned its leadership model to be Native-led, which included forming an Indigenous steering council and developing a memorandum of understanding with the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Council. The organization took a similar approach to its landscape. It developed a vision and goals document for the land remediation work in consultation with the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Council; Misty Cook, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe and herbalist; landscape architect Jamie Purinton; botanist Claudia Knab-Vispo; and meadow specialist Beth Romaker.
Biscarra Dilley explained that developing a process for managing the site was a structural response to the structural problem of colonization. While land acknowledgments reference the violence of colonialism, the reparative work Forge is doing is an example of what might come after.
“We’re building on a relational way of doing things, which is central to how we work,” Dilley said. “It’s understanding the land not as it has been conceptualized through settlement— something inanimate or somehow objectified— but understanding place as an interlocking and interdependent set of relations. We’re not just talking about the plants; we’re talking about all of the life that the land supports.”
It’s a metaphorical way of exploring what “land back” might look like. While the Stockbridge-Munsee have sought the return of their land, like at Monument Mountain, they have not requested the same of Forge Project’s site. But if they do, “we will have been stewarding the land in alignment as best we can with their protocols,” said Paloma Wake, strategy and operations manager at Forge. “So if it does come back to them, it’ll be in a better place.”
Forge and the landscape designers mapped the landscape and took account of the plant communities in various zones. Then they thought about how native plants could be “invited” into the landscape—a term that comes up often when discussing Forge’s remediation work and speaks to the relational method of caring for the land. Cook’s 2013 book Medicine Generations influenced the plant mix. “We drew up this long list of plants that theoretically would be acceptable,” Knab-Vispo explained. “And then it was really a matter of looking at the site conditions and who would actually be happy there.”
Some areas, like the lawn, had no native plants, so the team decided to take a high-intervention approach to that area. This entailed the complete removal of all the grass (mostly Kentucky bluegrass, which is of European origin), tilling the soil, applying a horticultural vinegar, and reseeding it with a custom meadow mix. “The plants of European origin were a profound reminder of the hard and painful history of colonialism, so their removal felt like a significant act of reclamation as much as remediation,” Purinton said. For this reason, the landscape design team also decided to part with the ornamental weeping cherry trees and yellow magnolias that lined the driveway.
Other wetter, rockier parts of the site had more biodiversity. Here, the team opted to remove plants they didn’t want to see—like purple loosestrife and multiflora roses, species that grow aggressively and crowd out native ones—and nurture or add the varieties they wanted to see. There’s an understanding that even though some of the plants might not be native to the area, they are playing a role in the landscape. Small yellow trefoils, for example, act as nitrogen fixers. “Plants will grow where they’re needed, even if we’re not ready for them,” Wake explained.
Today, much of the removal process takes place slowly, by hand. It mostly happens during Meadow Work Days, which Forge Project, Knab-Vispo, and Purinton lead. During these afternoons, volunteers come to help selectively remove discouraged plants. In exchange, they learn about the landscape. This type of relationship building is at the heart of the remediation work. “We’re learning alongside the land and inviting people into that process,” Wake said. Instead of putting culturally significant plants on display, like in a clearly labeled medicine garden, the Forge Project landscape encourages people to take the time to learn about them and add dimension to the richness they are experiencing.
While parts of the meadow might appear to be uncultivated by Western standards, it is still tended. If left alone, the surrounding forest would grow back into the cleared meadow. Part of the ground maintenance includes cutting back saplings that might crop up. But what exists now are more plants that help pollinators and reflect the culture at Forge Project. “I always like to point out that the term ‘restoration’ gets used with different reference points,” Knab- Vispo shared. “At Forge Project, we don’t try to ‘restore’ an ecosystem that has never existed there before. We’re inviting more native plants back into the current landscape, which reflects centuries of European-style land use and—in some places—is dominated by European plants.”
Forge is still experimenting with its model. It’s been a little over 18 months since it embarked on this remediation work, and as time goes on, the model will evolve as the organization learns and listens to what the land wants to do. As Biscarra Dilley reminds us, “The land has agency.”
Diana Budds is a design journalist based in Brooklyn, New York.