Chuck Stead is known around Rockland County as a talker who can tell a particularly poignant tale or fluidly recall an important piece of local history. Or speak convincingly to a roomful of corporate lawyers, town officials and related officials to do the right thing.

   Photo by Geoff Welch

Ramapo’s reknowned raconteur was just awarded a PhD from Antioch University New England while also being given the second Toni Murdock Student Innovation Award which recognized Stead’s research and leadership in organizing with communities related to his environmental work in the Ramapo Torne Valley.

“Your work as a storyteller, activist, and researcher is a model for the role that academics can play in the healing of communities and ecosystems,” said Stephen Jones, president of Antioch University New England (AUNE), about Stead’s PhD project which led to his winning the Student Innovation Award.

Dr. Chuck Stead in his Antioch University New England cap and gown, after receiving his PhD / Photo courtesy of Stead family

Stead’s PhD dissertation is an interdisciplinary Recovery Narrative on community and uses industrial history, ecotoxicology, memoir,  and indigenous traditional ecological knowledge to create what he calls a “narrative of recovery.”

Stead’s work weaves together a complex narrative of the toxic legacy of Ford’s Mahwah automobile plant that illegally dumped paint sludge throughout Torne Valley and Hillburn, as well as Ringwood, in the 1960s and ’70s. The dumping not only left behind ground contamination but damaged the Ramapough community, leaving a legacy of illness and devastation.

Through persuasive persistence and sheer narrative skills, Stead has been able to create allies and alliances within the community, such as Town of Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence, as well as governmental agencies, that, together, eventually were able to bring Ford Motor Company to the negotiating table and enter into a remediation agreement that has been cleaning up old paint sludge sites throughout Torne Valley.

To date, more than 40,000 tons of hazardous waste have been extracted from clean up sites around Torne Valley at a cost to Ford of close to 15 million dollars.

“What we’ve done with the garden is we’ve committed Ford to building us a medicine garden, when appropriate, when they complete an extraction or clean up of a brownfield,” Stead said. “In another year, we’ll complete the clean up near the Saltbox and we expect another medicine garden there.”

The medicine garden slated for dedication at the June 8 ceremony will cover approximately half an acre and grow Sweet Grass for basketry and smudging, as well as sage and a series of healing herbs beneficial for cancer patients.

“I’m hoping to encourage the Ramapough’s to come to steward the garden in such a fashion that will move them closer to re-imagining or re-igniting their basket weaving traditions,” Stead said, mentioning that the Mohawk Nation, who are special guests for the garden dedication, are renowned for their basket weaving.

Stead’s Torne Valley work is hands on and rooted in education — the Ramapo Saltbox Environmental Research Center was built in Torne Valley with the aid and participation of students from BOCES, Ramapo College in New Jersey and beyond. Stead was awarded the 2013 Historical Preservation Leadership Award by the Rockland County Historical Society for his Saltbox effort, which has itself served as a sort of taproot for Stead’s educational and environment work.

The Healing of the Earth Ceremony on June 8 is set for 2 p.m. and will dedicate a Traditional Medicine Garden that the Ford Motor Company has built and will gift to members of the Ramapough Lenaape Nation and to Chuck Stead’s environmental studies students. The Medicine Garden has been planted at one of Ford’s former lead paint dump sites and will become part of the growing complex of historical features taking root in and around the Ramapo Saltbox in Torne Valley.

The event is free and open to the public and will include members of the Ramapough Nation, guests from the Mohawk Nation, descendants of the Ramapo Iron Works community, local politicians, and representatives from Ford Motor Company.