Morning light captured a circle of stones just beyond the Shokan home of Judith Boggess as she walked its perimeter, like she does most days, pausing at each quadrant of the medicine circle she built years ago.
“It’s a circle broken up into the four directions,” the 82-year-old said, referring to a central tenet of indigenous cultures. “I use it for meditation. I use it to talk to my ancestors.”
Boggess, who is also known as Laughing Owl, and her longtime friend Susan Higgins, 72, known as Singing Rain, have spent decades tracing their Munsee, Lenni Lenape, Cherokee and Choctaw ancestry. Both women have belonged to the Association of Native Americans of the Mid-Hudson Valley for much of their adult lives.
These days, they’re members of the Red Feather Drummers, a women’s drum circle that performs at schools, nursing homes, community events, and shares stories during practice sessions. The Thanksgiving service they helped organize over the weekend in Kingston’s Old Dutch Church was still on their minds, as was the season itself and what it represents.
“Most of everything that’s passed down from Native Americans is oral,” Higgins said. “That’s a lot of times it’s lost because it’s not written down.”
Their friend Mary Lou Stapleton, chair of the Big Indian Native American Cultural Center, had planned to join them but was home sick. In a typical week, she would be at the table too, part of the same small circle of elders who organize ceremonies, answer questions from schools and try to keep local Indigenous traditions visible.
Thanksgiving, they said, isn’t so much a symbol of unity or gratitude as a reminder of genocide and forced removal that led to the expulsion or outright murder in the Catskills of Lenape, Munsee and Esopus people. At this time of year, they added, their work feels more urgent than ever, a way to assert presence in a region where Indigenous history has often been flattened into myth or reduced to names on signs.
“My mother didn’t tell us too much about it when we were going to school, because she was afraid of all the prejudice,” said Higgins, who lives in Kingston.
“Native Americans back then were looked at as if you were Black,” Boggess said. “And all the prejudice that went with Black went with Native Americans. So this is why you don’t admit that you’re Native American.”
They teach what Higgins calls “corrective history,” offering school assemblies and talks that center Eastern Woodlands cultures rather than those of the more widely taught Southwest.
“We go to schools and she is the one that teaches all the corrective history,” Higgins said, gesturing to Boggess. “We are trying to stick to this area because everybody seems to know about the Aztecs and the Hopis. They have gotten more publicity.”
Across the Overlook region, Indigenous presence lives on in place names and in stone. High on Overlook Mountain above Woodstock, dozens of stone cairns scatter the forest floor, some the size of small rooms. A few are 100 feet long.
To Boggess and Higgins, the cairns represent something more enduring, a reminder that Indigenous people built, marked and shaped this landscape in ways that survived even as communities were destroyed.
“These towns have deep ties to the Indigenous nations who shaped this landscape,” Boggess said, “yet their history now lingers mostly in the names of towns.”
The name closest to them is Shandaken, often translated from Munsee as “rapid waters” and a community whose modern-day flooding history includes events in 2011, 2005 and 1980.
A few miles to the west sits Big Indian, whose origin story is part tragedy and part legend. It tells of Winnisook, a seven-foot-tall Munsee man killed in the eighteenth century by a Dutch settler. His wife, Gertrude, the daughter of a Huguenot settler, tended his grave, and their children formed the heart of the community that now bears his name.
Whether every detail is factual, the tale captures a truth about loss and the violence that remade the Catskills, according to Evan Prichard, a professor of Native American history at Marist College and author of the 2007 book “Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquin People of New York.”
In Shokan, the conversation turned just as often toward the spiritual practices that anchor both women. Higgins spoke of dreams.
“Sometimes if I see a hawk in a dream, I know that that’s my spirit animal,” she said. She described leaving part of each dinner “on the plate, for the spirits,” giving thanks to the four directions. “You want to honor all that is making us be here,” she said. “You’ve got to thank that.”
The duo isn’t alone. In Olivebridge, 48-year-old Michael Essig, whose family he said were Ramapo Lenape cranberry pickers, described a resurgence in the Indigenous relationships to land.
“I was born with a native soul,” he said. “When you are a conquered people, colonialism strips people of their identity and replaces it with its own. But that connection is beautiful. Doing the creator’s work. Original instructions.”
Essig, who grows mushrooms and native botanicals and works with the Ashokan Center’s agroforestry program, said the point isn’t just nostalgia.
“When you become a better producer and creator, it is a matter of control,” he said.
Back in Shokan, Boggess and Higgins moved easily between memory and instruction.
“All life is sacred,” Higgins said. “Every blade of grass, every little insect. Everything. It is all related. We are all connected.”
The conversation paused. Beyond the window, the medicine circle lay in shadow, the east, the south, the west and the north. Thanksgiving, the women said, isn’t a single meal or a day on the calendar.
“The Native American Thanksgiving prayer can take days,” Higgins said.
On Thursday, kitchens across the country will fill with family, noise, heat, and food. At Boggess’ table, the work of remembering what she calls “corrective history” has already begun.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.