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Crossing Divides:
My Journey to Standing Rock
Vernon Benjamin with an Introduction by Will Nixon
On Thanksgiving Day in 2016, Vernon Benjamin, aged 70, loaded his pickup with supplies for the protesters at Standing Rock opposed to a new oil pipeline. He left his home in upstate New York for a journey across America unlike anything he’d ever done. He cared deeply about Native American causes. But Trump had won the election. The country was falling apart. Benjamin had always been a journalist, a historian, and a poet. Now, could he be an activist who put his heart and soul on the line? What he found at Standing Rock and in himself changed his life.
Vernon Benjamin also wrote the definitive two-volume set, The History of the Hudson River Valley. A lifelong Saugertiesian, he was a journalist, Saugerties supervisor for a term, aide to Maurice Hinchey in the New York State Assembly, and civic leader active with the Saugerties Public Library, Esopus Creek Conservancy, and the Saugerties Historical Society.
Crossing Divides documents a journey from the Hudson to Standing Rock on the banks of the Missouri River, where Vernon Benjamin delivered supplies to Indigenous protestors opposing the construction of an oil pipeline they feared would desecrate and contaminate their ancestral land and waters. Benjamin’s trip into the heart of the Lakota encampment is wrapped in his own personal story—journalist, political leader, academic, friend to New York’s Mohawk Nation, and activist.
“A little book with a big heart.” —Ned Sullivan, President, Scenic Hudson
The Improbable Community:
Camp Woodland and the Democratic Ideal
by Bill Horne
In 1939, a group of idealists inspired by the spirit of New Deal reform put their vision of American democracy into practice by creating Camp Woodland, a racially and ethnically inclusive summer camp for city kids located in the remote and scenic mountains of upstate New York. The camp’s innovative programs profoundly influenced campers for 24 summers from 1939 through 1962.
The founders of Camp Woodland were united by the progressive politics of the 1930s. Some were teachers influenced by educational reformers of the early 20th century. Some contributed administrative skills. And all were committed to racial and social justice well before the civil rights movement became a force in the 1950s and 1960s.
Camp Woodland quickly became a center (and later, a model) for the preservation of local traditions that attracted musicologists and musicians, like Pete Seeger, who supported and participated in its programs.
The Improbable Community tells the story of the people whose dreams created Camp Woodland and whose talents enabled it to succeed. It tells the story of the rural neighbors whom Woodlanders came to know and of the music, history, homespun skills, and folklore that they freely shared with their newfound friends. It tells the story of the musicians, performers, and musicologists who contributed creativity, zeal, and scholarship to Camp Woodland’s summer programs as well as their legacy of collected traditional music.