As an Upstate Institute Research Fellow this summer I worked with the Adirondack Diversity Initiative (ADI), a program of the Adirondack North Country Association (ANCA). ADI’s mission is to create an Adirondack Park and North Country region that are welcoming, safe, and inclusive for everyone. ADI works towards this by creating tools and strategies that diminish the impact of systemic racism in the Adirondack region. With my work this summer, some of the best ways I could help accomplish these goals were through being educated about the area and learning about the different experiences of visitors to the Adirondacks through community-based research. » Continue Reading.
By Leslie Sittner
Dream Home #1
I designed my dream log home, made the drawings, supervised every detail of its construction, and lived in it with my husband for 13 years until he passed away. During that time, we added naturalized landscaping, terraced vegetable gardens, and a large barn for the boy-toys. Log homes require constant maintenance. Particularly when they’re large with three levels. Then there’s the 200 feet of beach and 2 ½ acres of sloped woods. I can no longer maintain this alone. Especially feeding the hungry mouths of the wood stoves all winter.
I need to downsize. Simplify. Purge.
Rebuilding Thanksgiving for All
By Melanie Reding, Associate Director, Adirondack Diversity Initiative
Like many contemporary holidays and celebrations, Thanksgiving has become a holiday where oversimplification, misrepresentation and myths tend to dominate the narrative. The history and significance of the day is often overshadowed by commercialism and merry-making. Holiday shopping and Black Friday sales, which increasingly begin on Thanksgiving Day, have become a distraction from the celebration of family and togetherness.
Furthermore, when it comes to Thanksgiving, there is a deep and tragic history that for centuries Americans have refused to accept — choosing instead to perpetuate a harmful myth. Unlike the depiction in the 1912 painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, the relationship between the Wampanoag Tribe native to Massachusetts and the Pilgrims of that “First Thanksgiving” was anything but the school-taught myth of happy little Indians and Pilgrims sitting together enjoying a meal. In my school days, the lesson was taught with construction paper feathers, pilgrim hats and books where “I was for Indian” was accompanied by colorful images of smiling party guests.
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