In 1973, Jim and Margaret Hogan bought their piece of rural Burlington County, New Jersey. For $9,000, the couple secured themselves 1.5 acres of what was once part of Brotherton, the only reservation for Native Americans that the state has ever had.
Jim Hogan, now an 84-year-old father of five and grandfather of seven, stated:
“We didn’t know that when we bought it. A family from Pennsylvania sold it to us. It was all commercially zoned, and we thought this area, on a major highway, would be the next Cherry Hill.”
The Hogans were apparently wrong. Jim, now retired from his career as a construction-equipment salesman, explained that the area is still quite rural. His property was never developed, save for a small farmstand he built and used briefly.
“We tried to sell this land on and off, and after the last sale fell through in 2017, we decided to donate it to the Indians for a dollar,” Jim said. “The history of the US and the Indians is not too good, and we wanted to do something for them.”
By Wikimedia Commons user: Nikater
On September 4, 2018, the Hogans conveyed the deed to their property to the Brotherton Indian Reservation organization.
Brotherton used to be home to about 200 Leni-Lenape—or Delaware—people once. Over time, the reservation’s population dwindled until, in 1802, the state of New Jersey began to sell pieces of it to private buyers while residents migrated to other indigenous communities.
Joseph Littlefeather, recently elected chief of the Sandhill Lenape Cherokee Tribe, stated:
“I want to thank him for doing this. We want to put a farm stand on the land, and eventually open an office there, so people who live down there don’t have to travel so far.”
Nevertheless, Joseph Barton, mayor of Tabernacle, said he didn’t know that the deed had been transferred.
The fact that there are not federally recognized Native American tribes in the state of New Jersey does not stop the local indigenous population from organizing. “We don’t receive any money from the State of New Jersey and we don’t have anything to do with the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” said Littlefeather of the group of hundreds of descendants of a group also referred to as the Brotherton Indians.
Littlefeather and others are not looking to kick the non-native residents off of their former land, as he said: “We’re not going to go down there and throw everybody out of their houses.” However, if descendants of the Brotherton Indians can reestablish themselves on even a little bit of their native land, it would undoubtedly be a step in the right direction.
Reference: The Mind Unleashed
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