EDISON — When you think of Native American tribes in the modern-day U.S., it’s likely that most people wouldn’t think of Ringwood, a New Jersey suburb nestled into the rugged mountains 40 minutes northwest of New York City.
Yet, the Ramapough Mountain Indian Tribe has been a fixture in American history, from Revolutionary War-era iron mines to the construction of the Empire State Building
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TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — The ongoing saga involving Ford and the Ramapough Indians over the ongoing cleanup of a northern New Jersey superfund site will be chronicled in an HBO documentary that has its first airing Monday night.
Two investigative reporters from The Record of Woodland Park are among those featured in “Mann v. Ford,” which will also air several times later this month.
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In 1955, Ford built America’s largest auto plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, just up the river from New York City. And between 1967 and 1971, Ford dumped hundreds of tons of toxic waste into mineshafts in northern New Jersey—right in the backyards of communities.
The sludge of lead, arsenic, Freon, paint chemicals and dioxins poisoned the members of the Ramapough Native American community, causing a spate of severe health problems. Mothers started having miscarriages; people started coming down with cancer. One member of the Ramapough, Wayne Mann, led the charge against Ford in 2005 with a lawsuit stating that they had deliberately poisoned the land and the people living on it. The class action suit finally carried through in 2008; but with an impending bankruptcy on the horizon, the Ramapough took a settlement averaging $8,000 per plaintiff—except for the 30 people in the area who died of cancer while the lawsuit went through the courts.
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An HBO documentary chronicling the civil case filed against Ford Motor Company by the Ramapough Indians premieres Monday night and promises to reignite the debate surrounding the auto giant’s treatment of the residents of Upper Ringwood.
“Mann v. Ford” follows the five-year course of the suit, spurred on by years of Ford’s dumping of toxic paint sludge from its Mahwah plant and the health problems associated with the dumping.
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In 2006, approximately 30 years after the Ford Motor Company had dumped toxic waste on the land of the Ramapough Mountain Indians, the Ramapough filed a class action lawsuit against Ford and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) due to countless premature deaths.
Tonight Producer Jamie Redford (son of Oscar-winning Hollywood icon Robert Redford) along with producer Micah Fink, and producer and director Maro Chermayeff will showcase Mann v. Ford, a story of the battle of the Ramapough Indians in a bid to secure a healthier future for their children in the face of alleged atrocities committed by the Ford Corporation and the EPA..
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First, you hear the sound of birds singing, and over the next 104 minutes, you see many images of nature in full glory.
But the story “Mann v. Ford” goes on to tell is jarringly ugly.
The HBO documentary, which airs at 9 p.m. today, takes its name from a class-action lawsuit that Wayne Mann and some 600 other members of the Ramapoughs in Upper Ringwood brought against Ford Motor Co. in 2006 for its dumping of toxic waste from its Mahwah plant around their homes between 1967 and 1971.
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When I lived in Staten Island, N.Y., in the 1970s, I remember waking up many mornings, breathing deeply, and saying to the other nuns, “Ah, smell New Jersey.” Of course, the Staten Island landfill took over the airways in the early 1990s when I lived in Staten Island once again. By then, the slaughterhouse in Elizabeth, N.J., at the end of the Goethals Bridge was closed, and the refineries did something to at least make the unbearable heavy smell of chemicals diminish so we could breathe New York’s garbage.
In 1955 the Ford Motor Company built the largest auto manufacturing plant to date in U.S. history in Mahwah, N.J. Between 1967 and 1971 it dumped a deadly cocktail of toxic waste including paint sludge, Freon, lead and arsenic, and other industrial waste — creating dioxin — into abandoned mine shafts in Upper Ringwood, N.J., the backyard of the Ramapough Native American community. The waste saturated the ground causing fires and the toxins traveled through the air making people break out in sores and become sick.
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bullshit on a stick, Civil Rights, Environment, federal fuckwits at the helm, Grifters Extraordinaire, Legal Issues, Politics, The Corporatocracy, Those who represent The Corporatocracy, Worst of the Lot
First and foremost, the EPA failed this community and it’s inhabitants miserably, and some, like me, would say criminally. This fact alone should worry and/or bother all Americans. Today, millions and millions of people live within miles this Superfund site. From a short synopsis on the documentary by an independent film reviewer:
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The Ramapough Indians are sick. The Native American tribe has lived on land in northern New Jersey since before the Mayflower landed, but their beautiful acres – replete with green forests and rolling hills – are poisoning them.
In Mann v. Ford, directors Micah Fink and Maro Chermayeff explore the history of the people, splitting focus between the late 1960s when the Ford Motor Company began using the land as a dumping ground for its waste and near-current day when the people of the small town file suit against the company for gross negligence.
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Wayne Mann sat with his eyes closed at a Wednesday screening of “Mann v. Ford,” a documentary premiering tonight on HBO, as part of the cable channel’s annual summer documentary series.
It was the third time he’d seen the film.
And, anyway, he didn’t need to watch to know the story.
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