Film Screening & Discussion: The Meaning of the Seed

An Environmental Justice Documentary

Wednesday, October 6, 2021
6-7pm Via Zoom

Hosted by Rutgers Public History Program as part of the Humanities Action Lab’s Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice exhibit programming

Featuring stories from the Ramapough Lunaape, musical performance and discussion facilitation by Francisco G. Gómez and Nicole Wines of Raíces Cultural Center

REGISTER

Zoom link will be distributed to registrants in advance of the event

View the Climates of Inequality digital exhibit 

Sponsored by the Rutgers Public History Program & History Department. Contact ko239@history.rutgers.edu for more information.

ABOUT THE EXHIBIT

Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice—an international traveling multi-media exhibition web platform (climatesofinequality.org), and series of dialogues exploring the history and future of climate and environmental justice—is being virtually hosted by Rutgers New Brunswick in Fall 2021. A coalition of 500 university students, scholars, and frontline communities from 22 cities to create the digital exhibition. New Brunswick joined these communities to explore the historical roots of climate inequality and environmental injustice in their localities, share personal experiences, and develop strategies for change. Through virtual reality, audio testimony, and historical imagery, the exhibition explores how the climate crisis and environmental injustice is intensifying inequality—and how the experiences of the hardest-hit communities hold the key to confronting these issues and finding ways to move forward.

For its hosting in New Brunswick, NJ the exhibition includes “Climate Justice is Worker Justice,” a special focus on the relationship between climate change and worker safety, developed by Rutgers students in collaboration with New Labor, an organization that supports, educates, and organizes workers while fighting to improve conditions of workplace health and safety, and participating in activities that create hyperlocal solidarity between the environmental and worker justice movements. While Rutgers’ hosting stint is virtual due to the Covid-19 pandemic, public programs will be held by Zoom, including talks by labor and climate scholars and New Labor members. Additionally, a companion exhibition titled “Labor Sweated Here: Histories of Workers and Environments in New Jersey,” is on display in the Zimmerli Art Museum during the Fall 2021 semester.

ABOUT THE FILM

In September 2020 the documentary crew filmed a talking circle of Ramapough elders, relations, and partners at the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm. The resulting documentary- The Meaning of the Seed – is structured along the layers of the landscape, chronologically working up from the ground to the overstory. The first section, SOIL, describes the history of contamination in Ringwood and the contaminated ground that many Native Americans live on or near. SEED recounts the struggles of the Ramapough and their cultural connections to the land. GROWTH chronicles the Ramapough’s cultural restoration program and efforts to work towards food sovereignty through their recently inaugurated Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newton, NJ. Finally, SUNLIGHT is a call to action, as the talking circle participants urge a younger generation to become involved with environmental justice movements.

The ancestral home of the Ramapough Lunaape (Lenape) Turtle Clan is Ringwood, New Jersey. The landscape includes former iron mines, Native American rock shelters, a forest in which people hunt and forage for food, a large drinking water reservoir, deep pockets of contaminated soil, streams that now flow with orange water, a stew of different chemical toxicants from the former Ford manufacturing plant, and the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site. People live in the Superfund site, just upstream from the Wanaque Reservoir, which provides drinking water to millions of New Jersey residents.