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2004-2021. 35mm and Digital Still Images.
Casconchiagon Northstar Valley
The Title is in progress as new information of the area pre settlement is revealed and the translation adapted if need be. The title was initially RiverRat; a local colloquial term for people from the neighborhood who frequent the riverside likened to the Muskrat, Ondatra zibethicus.
All research for this project was done at Rochester Central Public Library. This photographic project began when I was 14 over 20 years ago as a record of the local ecology and surroundings I would find in my neighborhood river valley with my brother Jonathan. Fortunately a biodiverse space occurring and preserved largely out of happenstance. Influenced by nature books our mother and grandmother's photo albums and scrapbooks we wanted to make a field guide for our family and friends. It has since evolved through research taking into context local history and contemporary matters facing residents including the effects of institutionalized racism and colonialism on the people and natural environment and the connections that bind each. The area photographed is Casconchiagon, a village of the Seneca known as the Onondowahgah among members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and after settlement in the area it became known as two adjacent settlements on either side of the Genesee river Carthage and Kelseys Landing. The project is focused on the adjoining neighborhoods and 1.8 mile stretch of river valley of largely limestone and shale gorge wall split by glaciers and later erosion from the north flowing Genesee river.
Tucked away within the post industrial inner city landscape of Rochester NY northern crescent neighborhood residents take heed of a natural resource in their backyard. There they catch their limit of trophy sized salmon in an area long ago settled by multiple groups throughout history.
Once an expansive network of longhouses territory of the Seneca of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy members of the original Five Nations, the northern crescent was a biologically diverse space, the soil so rich the area was referred to as the fertile crescent. Soon after the Phelps and Gorham purchase and later settlement in the area many species began to disappear from the area. Old growth woods were cleared as the population increased. Two adjacent settlements on either side of the Genesee river Carthage and Kelseys Landing were built experiencing a moment of economic prosperity to later be dissolved into the growing settlement upstream (Rochester) after bankruptcy derivative of roads and railroads circumventing once popular use of steamships and a crippling fire destroying much of Carthage. Rochester, once a boomtown with much of its contemporary infrastructure directed by major industrial complexes Kodak and Xerox is now in moment of economic and population decline. However, simultaneously some native species including black bear, beavers, coyotes, mink, cormorants and sturgeon aided by environmental conservationists efforts are experiencing a population rebound. Though migratory atlantic salmon once finding their way by homing signal to the Genesee river from the far away atlantic ocean are now blocked by hydroelectric dams owned by a privately owned overseas firm who controls the area's utilities. There is a local effort to transition to public utility. There is an expansive northwest coho salmon and trout stocking program yielding such voracious populations it has sustained populations of a non-native atlantic species of sea lamprey. Every fall the area is swarmed by fisherman from around the world to catch their take. There are many invasive plants, trees and insects in the area decimating the soil and local ecology. You are now hard pressed to find native species of trees and plants as well as many invertebrate insects.
Remnants and bricks of the original structures of Carthage and Kelseys Landing still lay at the waters edge and are used today in improvised riverside barbecues. Many northern crescent residents came to Rochester from southern states and Puerto Rico as early as the 1960s in search of opportunity. Often they found closed doors at opportune industries in town or at best took entry level agricultural and menial labor jobs with little or no upward mobility. Illegal segratory housing practices restricted newcomers to old housing stock in the north east quadrant of Rochester(Northern Crescent). Barred from the social economic resources of the south and east sides of the city the legacy lasts today in de-facto school segregation, blatant inequalities, demographics, attitudes, and opportunities. Out of happenstance the neighborhood sits beside this largely left alone natural resource.
After the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act enacted by congress enabled the capture and return of runaway slaves within the territory of the U.S imposing penalties on anyone who aided in their flight, citizens at the port at Kelsey's Landing harbored escaped slaves who would board cargo steam ships bound for Canada. A historical marker at the location reads, "Freedom was assured for escaping slaves who boarded Canadian vessels here at the end of the Underground Railroad"
This project is a document of a people's reclamation of access to nature. Much has change since this project began over 20 years ago, my intentions focused on the preservation of the space, its history, and the natural environment contingent on the preservation of the cultural and socioeconomic class background of these neighborhoods and adjoined natural space highlighting the importance of their immediate access to this natural space forever. A visage of that 40 acres.
Continued.
Racist segregation housing practices including steering and redlining largely ending in the 1970s then immediately finding a new form in predatory lending towards foreclosure by bankers investors and real estate agents permitted black and brown new comers to Rochester NY after 1920 to choose only from derelict housing stock in neighborhoods on the northeast and southwest side of the city along the river valley. In search of opportune industry or simply escape the brutality of the south many moved to northern cities like Rochester NY. Mirrored today after industrial decline in stagnant wage temp agency jobs in remaining industries and start ups barred from opportune jobs within booming industrial sector jobs taking menial labor jobs, concurrently Puerto Ricans, South Americans and Caribbeans found work largely on area farms. All only to meet racism and disparities again under the guise of neighborhood redevelopment largely within the northeast and southwest side of the city. The legacy of grandfathered careers, homes, neighborhoods and dead end jobs, ghettoization and transient housing for everyone else lasting to this day. James Baldwin once said “urban renewal means Negro removal” The legacies of urban renewal the displacement and dispossession of neighborhoods, businesses and social capital, warehousing into project buildings, the bulldozing neighborhoods for highways, de facto segregation and resulting defunding of schools and social inequalities are lived today in these neighborhoods precipitating poverty foreclosure and mass incarceration affecting what would become a vulnerable class whose growing numbers are sustained by these systems of oppression. A period of unrest followed a culmination of disparity and brutal police practices in the summer of 1964. A moment repeated from 2019-2020. An unsurprising response that was rightfully a revolt though assessed as a senseless riot by press quelled by the national guard served to justify organized neighborhood disinvestment and city sanctioned blight that lasts even today. Like many other cities attempts at insurrection by lower and working classes have been met with indiscriminate force. In 2012 on a street adjacent to the river valley a young man suffering from untreated mental illness lost his life in a barrage of bullets in a standoff with police that should not have resulted in any lives lost. Only as recent as this year 2019 will the Rochester police force be held accountable for their actions by the civilians they serve. The first municipality in New York state to have a independent review for police misconduct with the power to conduct its own investigations or to impose punishments. A byproduct of the constant untiring efforts from local grassroots movements and coalitions affecting change through actions demonstration and legislation passed by voters that will hopefully stick around and affect similar change in other cities. There have been a number of police killings of civilians in the neighborhood photographed as well as a non fatal police shootings of unarmed civilians in the past decade, a number that will now be tracked publicly. To escape the very real and lived experience of these legacies residents find solace in the river valley. The exact area of these photographs specifically the photo of the river waters edge at dusk formerly known as Kelseys Landing was once the last stop on the Underground Railroad. It was where enslaved Africans escaping to the north by way of the north star harbored by abolitionist’s boarded steamships bound for Canada with their captures at their heels. Nicknamed the “Bloodhound Law” for the dogs used to hunt down fugitives from slavery, The Fugitive Slave Act passed by congress on September 18, 1850 allowed southern plantation owners to cross into “free states” in pursuit of whom they saw as their property with the assistance of the United States Government. Not unlike I.C.E agents boarding greyhound buses at the Downtown terminal today ejecting riders and checking id’s. Todays poverty criminalizing cash bail system, quota hungry police and private prison industrial complex have simply replaced the institution of slavery. After John Brown, and collaborators raid at Harpers Ferry, Marshals drew suspicion on Frederick Douglass as he met with Brown 3 weeks prior to the raid. Although not present at the raid therefor innocent Douglass was implicated and forced to flee so he may not share a similar fate of another innocent Rochester man implicated, Shields Green who was hanged. Anna Murray Douglass who supported her husband Frederick in mind body spirit and pocketbook fled to England via steam ships at Kelseys Landing, the very method they had used in shepherding fugitives from slavery. The very place where Shields Green had made the decision to stay in the U.S risking his life and freedom and join the abolitionists. In the late 1800s and early 1900s the area was a booming textiles district with one business surviving today. Emma Goldman was Inspired by workers efforts and revolts in Chicago, radicalized by harsh working conditions and low wages in the Garson & Meyer factory she found employment at after emigrating to the northeast Rochester neighborhood from Lithuania. Goldman came of age as a leader and speaker for worker equality later attaining fame as an anarchist activist and writer beginning with lectures at the Labor Lyceum on Saint Paul Boulevard. The once remaining textile in the neighborhood Hickey Freeman unwilling to modernize, mechanize or export labor with its fair wages, worker treatment, was a testament to Goldman’s efforts. It has since closed in 2023.
At the rivers edge you find solidarity that survived imposed divisive physical and spacial barriers. Barriers, displacement, and animosities indoctrinated though colonialism, urban renewal and segregation by way of neighborhood dispossession coded as redevelopment, foreclosure, broken windows policing, and gentrification. It is in solidarity and coordinated cooperative efforts that some are combating this through tenants unions and collective buying as a form of protection from home foreclosure. The same groups originating in Rochester are attempting to make the sweeping protections from eviction in NYC and statewide. Historically Interventions and displacement have had enormous consequences. Ancestral lands of the Seneca Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, The very Haudenosaunee among the Great Law of Peace, the oral constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy of which the constitution was co-opted. Cutting through the river valley on the northeast side is a preserved section of a large network of trails stretching across the northeastern territories of the Six Nations. Nearby lie the foundation of a 3-acre palisaded village. There is little to no mention of this history and how it relates to today in area public schools though some Seneca remained in the neighborhood. The development of waterway shipping led to European settlements on sovereign land breaking affirmed Haudenosaunee land rights established in the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 as well as rampant pollution of area watersheds that continues today and made worse by hydro-fracking. The act of separation and dislocation is not unlike the period of urban renewal in which highways bisected historically black and Latino neighborhoods intensified today through gentrification. What is mentioned of settler colonialism in the classroom is set within the narrow context as an historic event rather than the enduring institutional development and American structure it has become and continues to be.
Vestiges of animism neighborhood residents are connected to the natural environment. Beyond food sustenance deep care for and extensive knowledge of wildlife is common in the neighborhood. Going into the river valley does a lot of good for neighborhood residents be it fresh air or change in perspective, at most a sense of freedom. For people of color and poor people who were violently and systemically removed from the land simply being present in a natural space is a radical act. Of defiance, love and self care. It is where we may heal and reconnect with our power. With housing prices going up in the area and new comers settling in these once redlined neighborhoods it is imperative that gentrification is met head on, resisted and housing be preserved. A biodiverse space within city limits there are species long thought to be gone from the locality sustained by the environment itself, its obscurity, lack of development and efforts by the department of environmental conservation. However many native species of plants and animals are at risk or in decline due to shrinking habitats and pollution. Many species of fungi, plants, and wildlife that where common in my youth are now gone. Restoration is possible though it is pertinent to permanent changes. Major breakthroughs including the reintroduction of the once gone sturgeon are great indicators or a revitalizing waterway. You can plant these native species of plants where they no longer flower and seed, return populations of the fish, amphibians, invertebrates, small mammals and predators; but without protection in the form of landback or sovereignty and oversight in the area with the collaborative effort of remediation, runoff will continue to increase unsustainable levels of algae bloom, the rain and atmosphere will continue to provide a toxic brownfield unyielding soil of which even the most hardy invertebrates and plants cannot survive, small mammals and predators will starve and lose territory. Even neighborhood residents will struggle with gardens in land and soil historically referred to as the Fertile Crescent. Remediation is important. Sharing the name and in ways the soil, in the way the similarly crescent shaped land accompanying the similarly north flowing mineral depositing river Nile supported its inhabitants historically. This northern fertile crescent is now referred to as the fatal crescent for many reasons including agricultural and industrial runoff however that name was coined for the violence present indicative of long ago disparity creating and upholding white supremacy. The land itself suffering as are those living from it. All of these issues have been presented in compartmentalized complexities perhaps designed that way to deflect accountability. When you experience it all and all at once it is very easy to see it is all connected. Racism, police violence, divisive rhetoric or ideology, displacement, colonization, gentrification all bound together never ending in one time, guised as historical events and separated to complete the deception and illusion. Statistics and ecology tells another tale. Neighborhood residents simply being present in the space is a form of activism in the ever-important struggle for environmental conservation and protection of our waterways is crucial as is the procurement of funds for environmental services and ensuring commercial regulation. The very recent September 12th 2019 repeal of the 2015 clean water act comes to mind. The result will have immediate repercussions on the population and the environment. The area displayed here is still reeling from the dumping of toxic chemicals in periods of no regulation and run off only made worse by the impacts of climate change that disproportionately affect the lower and working classes and people living in this area and abroad. Asthma rates skyrocket in the community as a direct result of environmental racism. Associated diseases persist never being addressed or met as they would with those with premium health care. Inadequate health care and unwillingness of corporations and or municipalities responsible to take the financial burden of ceasing detrimental practices let alone take responsibility thereby affecting the community further later leading to increased cancer rates as the affected population ages. Most state/health officials not cognizant or in denial of the larger picture blaming the individual’s lifestyle rather than the structural issues of which the affected population is a part of. Organizing the community to combat such policy is pertinent. As is the preservation of land, honoring treaties and Indigenous sovereignty, and the prevention of tactics in further cultural erasure and displacement in the area.
Sources/Resources
https://roccitylibrary.org/
https://ganondagan.org/
https://www.senecamuseum.org/
http://www.downtowndubiously.com/
http://houseofmercyrochester.org/
https://rochestermennonite.org/
LROC - Library Resource Outreach Center LROC
https://www.esf.edu/restorewildflowers
https://www.esf.edu/restorewildflowers/NYS%20Wildflower%20Identification%20Guide.pdf
https://unitedplantsavers.org/
www.lowerfallsfdn.com
geneseelandtrust.org