Indigenous art or not?
Area woman claims cliff wall in Stamford boasts artwork; preservation and Native groups have doubts
STAMFORD — Kathleen Patricia Thrane has a small arsenal of books about the Indigenous people of Southwestern Connecticut in the back of her car.
When she opens up one tome to find information on sacred figures in Indigenous art, almost all the pages are littered with notes and underlining. Sticky notes — some with annotations and at least one with a detailed doodle — fall out of one book while she searches for the entry on Mesingw, a spirit from the Lenape tradition.
For much of the past year, she has been on an archaeological mission.
Thrane, who lives in Greenwich, wants to prove that the cliff behind a pending development site across from Mill River Park is home to prehistoric Native American art unlike anything found in Connecticut before.
There’s a laundry list of organizations she has to convince, including the city, the State Historic Preservation Office and the tribal organizations of the
Native American traditions she wants to save.
All have approached her claims with extreme caution.
“I’m open to the idea that there could be sites I’m not familiar with,” Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer Catherine Labadia told The Stamford Advocate. However, there are steep obstacles to proving that hypothesis, she said.
“There are examples of Indigenous rock art throughout the region, but they are not done in this style, nor do they represent the same iconography,” she added.
Thrane’s colleague Johnna Paradis was the person who initially identified the cliff in question. She claims that she noticed the wall while walking through the West Side and immediately started to explore. Paradis had seen the gray and copper wall of rock before — she’s lived in Stamford her whole life— but said the site felt different this time.
Immediately, she called in Thrane, who she knew as a friend and hobby archaeologist. The pair threw themselves straight into getting the site acknowledged and preserve the upper half of a craggy stone wall that they say contains depictions of sacred figures from local Native traditions.
At first, their efforts focused on researching the location. Thrane calls herself an “avocational archaeologist” freely, and has a certificate in the field she earned from Norwalk Community College in the early 2000s.
In 2001, while completing the certificate course, Thrane helped spearhead another campaign to save Indigenous history in Stamford, an effort that was supported by the Connecticut Historic Preservation Office and a local Algonquin tribal association.
Those skills helped the two draft a 37-page paper on the new location, dubbing it “Mataubaun,” a name that pops up in a 19th-century history of Stamford written by the Rev. Elijah Baldwin Huntington. According to the Institute for American Indian Studies museum in Washington, Conn., the name also means “it is day” to the Delaware people in the region.
Thrane, in her paper, writes that the name means “standing rock,” and said she thinks the rock along Mill River Park has celestial value.
“The Light and Shadow art on the cliff is a visual performance, a narrative of Sacred Beings mentioned in Oral Histories,” she wrote in her paper. The shapes in the wall cast shadows across the cliffartists.
side and “transform shape over 6 hours on sunny days.”
To help further identify the shapes, Thrane has enlisted Yale-educated archaeologist Vance Tiede, whose work covers everything from “astro-archaeology at Stonehenge” to “Babylonian ziggurats and Chinese pyramid tombs.”
The research paper, sent out en mass, has reached desks and inboxes as far as Washington, D.C., as part of Thrane’s next phase of work: getting it officially recognized.
While Thrane said the research was grueling, persuasion has proven to be more challenging.
The city and SHPO have stated they believe that the indentations and cracks in the rock come from blasting, construction work and natural erosion over the years, not from Indigenous And Thrane has reached out to state and local officials and preservationists about the site; she’s tried to get hold of Gov. Ned Lamont, U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and scores of academics to help bring attention to her claims with little luck.
Along with proving the potential historical significance of the site, Thrane and Paradis said they want to stop a construction project approved in 2016 and scheduled for the parcel. A developer plans to put 110 residential units and some retail space in front of the rock wall. As per Stamford’s affordable housing requirement, 10 percent of the units will be set aside for people earning 50 percent of Stamford’s median income.
“The only thing that should be built there is a museum,” Thrane has said repeatedly.
The affordable housing requirement is at the crux of Thrane’s strategy for saving the site. She claims that the affordable housing requirement is linked to federal funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development since residents pay for their affordable housing with HUD-funded housing vouchers. Federal money means that the federal government has the power to intervene, she said.
Because of that, Thrane wants the government to conduct an impact study through a federal process called a Section 106 Review that “requires federal agencies to consider the effects of projects they carry out, approve, or fund on historic properties,” according to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
But housing vouchers don’t mean that a project is getting federal money, according to Stamford Land Use Chief Ralph Blessing.
“Section 8 vouchers, they’re given to people, not to households,” Blessing said. And people with below-market-rate apartments do not necessarily pay through vouchers. Instead, individual buildings administer their affordable housing programs and must make sure that residents meet the income requirements for their buildings.
But beyond the question of whether the federal government is or should be involved in Thrane’s preservation efforts, Susan Bachor, acting director of the Delaware Tribe Historic Preservation Office, has more specific concerns over Thrane’s efforts.
The Delaware nation has no record of this kind of light and shadow art, a hurdle that Thrane wants to overcome by having the site studied further. But Bachor — who has worked for the Delaware people for seven years, though she is not native — says most of the rock art documented by the Delaware people are petroglyphs: images pegged directly into the stone.
But there does remain more to discover of the Delaware people’s back story, she said, in part because of the painful history of genocide and displacement for the Delaware tribe.
“We were one of the first, if not the first one of the first tribes, to be forcibly removed,” she said. “And that early removal, and the amount of deaths that happened because of disease and the forced migration really caused a breach in knowledge.”
Because of the violent past, Delaware peoples are still learning their history and examining alreadyverified artifacts. The Delaware Tribe Historic Preservation Office is called upon constantly to review other cases of its culture being erased through the same federal review process that Thrane wants to trigger in Stamford. To an extent, Bachor said there’s so much work to be done that the tribe she represents cannot throw its weight behind projects like Thrane’s.
“We have so many fires that are burning in our homelands of known significance, of known importance, that sometimes these projects that are just on the outskirts of our territories that are a little sketchy will be put aside until they can be revisited,” she said.
However, as the matter stands currently, the tribe has no intention of intervening in Thrane’s work. According to Bachor, the issue is still investigative, and the origins of the site cannot be validated.
Even with a federally recognized tribal organization expressing doubts, Thrane refuses to give up. She said she believes in the site, believes in what she’s found.
“We have so little left,” Thrane said over the phone. “We cannot lose any more.”
“The only thing that should be built there is a museum.”
Kathleen Patricia Thrane