Local knowledge may be the last bastion of prejudice, a safe space for polite conversation to veer into soft bigotry without fear of discomfort, or worse. Last month, my wife and I were at a bed and breakfast upstate. Over coffee and French toast, we met a couple from Oswego, who shared a story—which sounded to me more like an apocryphal joke, involving a hamster and a vagina—about some of their neighbors to the east, on the Tug Hill plateau. “They’re just different,” the woman, who looked to be in her sixties, said. “It’s kind of Appalachian, if you know what I mean. Inbreeding and all that.” The description seemed to resonate with another couple at the table, who turned out to be from New Jersey. “We have some of those in Mahwah,” one of them said, alluding to Stag Hill, home of the Ramapough Mountain Indians.
The persistence of this kind of talk provided the subtext for a story that I wrote last year about the Ramapoughs—specifically, about the death of a tribe member, Emil Mann, at the hands of a park ranger, in the woods behind Stag Hill, and about an environmental lawsuit that several hundred others had brought against Ford Motor Company, for dumping toxic paint sludge. (There used to be a Ford plant in Mahwah—the largest automobile plant in North America. Most of the dumping took place just west of Mahwah, in and around some defunct iron mines for which Ramapough families had long provided much of the labor.) The lawsuit, and the tragic story behind it, is now the subject of a feature-length documentary, “Mann v. Ford,” which will début on H.B.O. tonight at 9 P.M.
