Bridging Waters: The Surprising Alliance of Indigenous Women and Catholic Nuns for Environmental Healing

As a kid growing up on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation in Southampton, New York, Tela Troge loved walking the path that led to the water near her grandmother’s house with her twin brother and cousins. They would see a whole host of vibrant wildlife there: fish, clams, scallops, and oysters. “It was a beautiful childhood,” Troge remembers.

Her connection to marine life went deep. She came from a long line of people who relied on the waters of Shinnecock Bay — fish and bivalves for food, shellfish for making wampum, and kelp for cooking, medicine-making, and even housing insulation.

“We never had much in terms of resources,” she recalls. “But my grandparents would always tell me we would be OK no matter what because we could live off the land and find food in the Bay.”

But as time went on, that reality began to shift. When Troge was about nine or ten, the first red and brown tides — harmful algal blooms that create toxins and hog the oxygen and sunlight other organisms need to survive — began to arrive, fed by inadequate sewage management, overdevelopment, and fertilizer runoff from the Nation’s wealthy neighbors.

“It was a devastating change. It pretty much ended the Shinnecock Nation’s oyster project,” she says, referring to an oyster farm that the Nation had begun in the ’70s. “It was just a huge mortality event. The red tides depleted all the oxygen and killed everything.” As an adult, Troge watched the health of the Bay continue to deteriorate to the point that she knew what her grandparents had once told her — that the Bay would sustain them — wouldn’t be true for her own kids.

For the Shinnecock Nation, living in harmony and balance with the water is a way of life.

So, when a nonprofit called Greenwave suggested that starting a kelp farm in the Bay might help address some of the ecological problems by pulling nitrogen and carbon pollution from the water, Troge saw the environmental remediation potential immediately. As an attorney, she also knew that Shinnecock tribal sovereignty has been intertwined with kelp for hundreds of years. A series of court cases from the 1600s called “The Seaweed Cases” upheld the Shinnecocks’ right to access and lease lots for seaweed. These centuries-old cases ultimately played a significant role in the Nation receiving federal recognition in 2010.

Farming kelp, she thought, could be a “way of continuing that tradition and legacy and honoring everything that our ancestors went through to ensure that we had that right to cultivate seaweed,” in addition to restoring the local ecological balance.

The key roadblocks? The arrival of settlers and centuries of colonization that followed deprived the Shinnecock of much of their land, many of their rights to practice time-honored traditions, and, crucially, access to the very body of water that bears their name: Shinnecock Bay, where Troge and her fellow farming hopefuls wanted to set up shop.

Though the Shinnecock had successfully earned federal recognition after a 30-year legal battle, they sometimes still felt they were on adversarial footing with representatives from New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation. These representatives made it hard for tribal members to access their waterways and sometimes even charged them with felonies for exercising their fishing rights.

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The solution to their problem came in a surprising form: a small cohort of Catholic nuns called the Sisters of St. Joseph. A group of Indigenous women voluntarily entering into a close, long-term partnership with a group of nuns might not seem an obvious choice. “We definitely have this very complicated relationship with the Catholic Church,” Troge says. “It was a very uncomfortable prospect to even consider working so closely with the sisters.”

History lays bare the reasons why Indigenous people might not look to the Catholic Church for allyship. The Doctrine of Discovery, initially laid out by the Church in the 1400s, authorized colonial powers to seize land and subjugate people in the “New World” and elsewhere, so long as the people in question weren’t Christian. The Catholic Church worked with governments to run boarding schools that became notorious for kidnapping and abusing Indigenous children. And those are just a few of the many ways the Church participated in and powered the engine of settler colonialism.

Yet Troge saw evidence that the Sisters of St. Joseph’s worldview overlapped significantly with that of the Shinnecock women. She remembers meeting Sr. Joan Gallagher for the first time and promptly being handed a copy of the sisters’ Land Ethic — which contains commitments “to treat all parts of Earth as sacred and Earth’s beings as our neighbors to be respected and loved,” among other things — and thinking how closely the values aligned with her own. “That was really striking to me, and it made me feel at ease almost immediately,” Troge says.

Sr. Gallagher describes the “charism” (or special spiritual gift) of the Sisters of St. Joseph as being focused on a “uniting love” that means they see themselves as “called to oneness that is beyond just humanity, and beyond an anthropocentric worldview.” This common approach toward the natural world helped foster alignment around shared views underpinning the two groups’ distinct traditions. The two had connected a few times over the years, with the nuns offering showers and Wi-Fi to protesters standing in solidarity with the Shinnecock, for example, which started to build mutual goodwill over time.

The sisters, for their part, describe a similar experience — just from the other side. Sr. Karen Burke remembers hearing the Shinnecock women talking about the sacredness of water and immediately feeling a connection. “So much of that resonated with our own story and faith traditions when it comes to the blessings of water, the holiness of water, and how we use water in ritual at the Church,” she says. She and the sisters believe that “our home is a creation and a revelation of God, that Earth reveals God to us, and God is revealed in all things of Earth. So, it calls for our reverence. It calls for our respect. It calls for our care for the community of life,” she adds. It felt to her like the Shinnecock women were on the same page.

Rebecca Genia, one of Troge’s relatives and fellow initiators of the farming project, contacted the sisters about using St. Joseph’s land to access the Bay’s water and start kelp farming. Her email reached Sr. Gallagher, who remembers thinking, “The Bay has their name. How can we say no?”

Soon, the two groups of women began meeting to discuss what it might look like to grow kelp in the Bay, and before long, the farm was born. What started as 10 lines (ropes that kelp grow from underwater) grew to 20. Before long, there were a hundred lines and a “hatchery” that the farmers used to seed their lines with baby kelp before transplanting them into the Bay, which is located on the same land as St. Joseph’s retreat center.

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Both the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Shinnecock kelp farmers are straightforward about the fact that discomfort accompanied their journey together. But the fact that both were willing to be honest about the history of the Catholic Church — “it’s not like we had to overlook it or swallow it; they never hid it,” says Genia — was significant in clearing a path for a thriving partnership.

The mutual admiration and respect that the two groups have for one another now, after having worked together closely for four years, is palpable when you ask them about one another. “When we look at that water together, it’s like, ‘yeah, we’re doing this in a good way, for the right reasons,'” says Genia. “We have a lot to heal from in the past, but we’re not just talking about it — we’re doing it. I’m very, very happy we found each other.” Not only are the people involved happy, but “the waters are happy,” says Genia.

Based on Greenwave’s projections, Troge initially thought that the kelp farm would be good for the health of the Bay, but in a way that might be hard to see with the naked eye and would certainly take a lot of time. Much to her surprise, the opposite has been true.

“The first year that we had our kelp farm, the number of species that came back to the waterways was mind-blowing. We started seeing everything from sea horses to crabs to sharks, clams, and oysters. They were flocking to our farm.”

As underwater life returned, so did the native birds that fed on the fish and clams. Even for people who weren’t spending all their time pulling up kelp lines in waders, the change was noticeable — like for the Shinnecock wampum jewelry artists. They had been experiencing difficulties working with shellfish in recent years because the shells were thinning and becoming more brittle due to ocean acidification, but they’ve now started to get stronger and thicker again.

Troge is proud of the work the kelp farmers are doing and hopeful that they’re building toward the kind of healthy Bay that will sustain future generations of Shinnecock. She’s also hopeful about the example that their relationship with the Sisters of St. Joseph might offer to others.

“Having this desire to repair and restore in a way that is beneficial not only to people but to the environment and the ecology has helped us overcome so many barriers,” she says. “I think the model of Shinnecock farmers and Sisters of St. Joseph’s relationship is one that can be emulated across the country.”

By Whitney Bauck