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Susan Scherf addresses the group at the Institute for American Indian Studies’ exhibit demonstrating components of Algonkian semi-permanent village.
Alec Linden
WASHINGTON — The southern-most Housatonic Heritage Walk of the year brought the socio-ecologically curious to the steep ravines and river valleys of Washington, Conn., for a guided investigation of the region’s original occupants and ongoing stewards.
Hosted on the property of the Institute for American Indian Studies and the adjacent Steep Rock Preserve, Susan Scherf, an educator with the institute, led a leisurely and informative stroll amid pristine fall weather on Sept. 21.
Scherf, who has spent decades teaching students how to read and learn their natural landscapes, began the event with the important clarification that she herself is not Indigenous. “My maiden name was Van Winkle,” she joked.
She acknowledged that the land is the ancestral home of the Weantinock and Pootatuck people and their descendants, now the Schaghticoke. She spoke in awe of the complex technologies indigenous peoples developed through intimate knowledge of the landscape, such as tanning leather and sapping maples. These traditions, of course, were adopted by colonial communities and remain central components of New England culture today.
Scherf led the group of 14 participants down a hemlock-shaded slope into the Steep Rock Preserve proper, explaining that the Eastern Hemlock was almost entirely eliminated in New England by European colonists, who figured out that the tannin-laden bark was effective at curing animal hides. Native communities, on the other hand, used a process that involved curing skins with animal brains and smoking them to preserve and protect the material.
Pointing at a shagbark hickory, Scherf explained that “they never denuded the land,” using woody trees like ash, elm and oak to construct semi-permanent residences but never clear cutting as they moved from place to place. Other plants, like cattails which she described as “the grocery store” for its many uses, were also used to build structures like wigwams in these communities.
Guiding the group to an open area by a sluggish bend in the Shepaug River, a tributary of the Housatonic River, Scherf mentioned that “this would have been a main highway for Natives.” She explained that Connecticut’s rivers were vital infrastructure for these groups who would summer along the coast and winter in the interior. This river would have once been teeming with American Eels and salmon, she said, but Connecticut’s – the namesake of which is the Algonkian Quinnetukut, meaning the land alongside the long tidal river – waterways were also important to industrialists. As a result, the 4,000-odd extant dams have all but eliminated these fish in the state.
As the group crossed an old rail line, covered in century-old coal and slag, she noted that while the river valley was an infrastructural hub for industrialists, it once was a primary thoroughfare for these semi-nomadic Indigenous people who would travel the river on 30-foot, thousand-pound canoes made from the vast trunks of tulip trees.
She led the group back up the gentle wooded slope, pointing out various plants like jewelweed, which is a good balm for itchy ailments, and coltsfoot, which Natives would have burned and used as a spice. She encouraged participants to chew on wintergreen leaves she found alongside the trail, drawing murmurs of approval from the hikers for its fresh, minty taste.
To conclude, she gathered the group between a model longhouse and wigwam in the Institute’s demonstration village. She emphasized that while these communities lived in close mutual respect with the landscape, they also looked out for their fellow humans. “No one was ever excluded,” she said, “it was the whole village constantly working together.”
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Cemeteries tell stories of Kent’s past
Sep 24, 2025
Speaking about Kent cemeteries during Wednesday’s session of People and Places are, from left: Bernadette Ellegard, Lorry Schiesel, Deborah Shifflett-Fitton, Tamara Potter and Marge Smith.
Ruth Epstein
KENT — It was a grave, yet entertaining talk. The latest in the People and Places series co-sponsored by the Kent Senior Center and Kent Historical Society on Sept. 17 focused on the town’s cemeteries.
Several speakers involved in the subject gave a perspective about the sites that abound around town. Historical Society curator Marge Smith began by noting nine town-owned cemeteries exist and four private ones. But during the session, it became apparent there are some small burial grounds tucked away in various — often unknown — spots, as well.
The oldest, said Smith, is Good Hill Cemetery on Route 7 North. At the time it was created in 1747, the Congregational Church meeting house was across the road and the minister’s daughter, who died young, was interred there. “It’s very sad,” she said. “Cemeteries don’t just record deaths, they tell stories.”
The second cemetery to be established was in Kent Hollow in 1768, and the third was the one at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, now in the center of the village. Reuben Swift, explained Smith, became discouraged with the Congregational Church and became affiliated with the Anglicans. His is the oldest stone at that burial ground.
In 1815, Bull’s Bridge Cemetery came into being, while Skiff Mountain Cemetery opened in 1825. Next came the Congregational Church when it moved down to what is now the village. In the 1970s, the Rev. Vincent Flynn of Sacred Heart Catholic Church founded that cemetery just north of the town center, and in 1984, Flanders Cemetery was established adjacent to the Catholic site. Nina and Joseph Pacocha, longtime Kent residents, purchased the first plots there.
Private burial grounds are at South Kent School, Kent School, Skiff Mountain and the Morehouse Cemetery on Richards Road.
“Cemeteries are a great resource for learning about history,” said Smith, “but unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Everything carved in stone is not necessarily true.” She gave an example of a stone that had been re-carved and the date of death was mixed up with the decedent’s age.
Tamara Potter, who along with her husband, William, were sextons for the town’s cemeteries for 30 years, gave a brief history of the Kent Cemetery Association, which was formed in 1923. Its purpose was to assist the town in preparing and bettering burial grounds. It was created because World War 1 had just ended and the upkeep of cemeteries was a hardship for the town.
When the Potters stepped down last year, the question arose as to who would oversee them going forward. The town voted to revert supervision back to the town and established the Kent Cemetery Committee. “The transition met with great success,” said Potter.
Lorry Schiesel, who chairs the committee of five with two alternates, said the group is responsible for six cemeteries: Good Hill, Flanders, Congregational Church, St. Andrew’s, Bull’s Bridge and Skiff Mountain. Brent Kallstrom serves as sexton.
“Our role is maintenance,” said Schiesel. “The sexton, which is a statutory role, makes sure burials go well.”
Committee member Bernadette Ellegard talked about technology that allows for helping to locate graves, while Kallstrom described his work. He has been sexton at Kent Hollow Cemetery and is familiar with many of the names of townspeople.
“My job is to help people when they are looking for a burial site and to finalize burials,” Kallstrom said. “I applaud pre-planning. I enjoy what I do.”
He spoke about the need to conserve space at these sites, noting that cremations make that goal easier. Granite is now used mostly for headstones because of its durability.
There are plans being made to demonstrate how to clean graves, using one of a Revolutionary War veteran. A tour of Revolutionary War veterans’ graves is scheduled for Oct. 26. Details for both will be announced.
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uconnhealth.org
We write today to express deep concern over the recent White House executive orders and federal legislation elevating political appointees’ influence in grants, cutting funds for critical research, and slashing Medicaid funds.
These actions threaten academic freedom, higher education, healthcare, and Connecticut’s economy. They are compounded by the $61.5 million cut to UConn Health in the most recent state budget.
Our elected officials must take swift action to protect the public good by allocating the resources needed to shore up Connecticut’s only public medical academic center.
Academic freedom under siege
The new executive order replaces expert peer review with political oversight, jeopardizing expert scrutiny and credible science while dismissing dozens of National Institutes of Health (NIH) reviewers, thus replacing the integrity and autonomy of scientific merit as they navigate an ever-changing political agenda. Critical fields like health equity, vaccine studies, reproductive health, gender studies, and LGBTQ issues are being defunded, undermining research that serves our communities.
Impact on UConn Health and our students
The repercussions are already being felt at UConn Health. In April 2025, NIH cancelled $1.7 million in unspent UConn research grants, including mental health and LGBTQ+ projects.
A proposed slash of indirect cost reimbursement to a flat 15% threatens $35 million annually. Infrastructure, administrative support, equipment and labs employing nearly 750 research positions, including graduate students, postdocs, and clinician-scientists, face immediate risk.
Impact of Medicaid/Medicare/ACA cuts on UConn Health and our patients
Federal legislation will cut or eliminate some Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax subsidies and reduce the number of eligible Medicaid/Medicare enrollees by as much as 20%, resulting in devastating losses for the University of Connecticut Health Center and our patients. Patients will lose access to primary care and rely more on costly emergency services — a devastating result for patient health and UCHC’s infrastructure. The anticipated direct loss from changes to Medicaid/Medicare to UCHC alone is $25 — $40 million. Additionally, this level of disenrollment jeopardizes UCHC’s 340B program eligibility, the loss of which could be between $49–$69 million.
Ripples through
Connecticut’s economy
The stakes extend well beyond our campus. In fiscal year 2024, NIH funding awarded $787 million to Connecticut institutions, impacting 6,831 jobs, and $1.78 billion in economic activity. These cuts endanger our research infrastructure and talent pool, pushing researchers to go elsewhere, hindering our ability to recruit top talent which can lead to a “brain drain.” The consequences include dampening state-generated innovation, threatening as many as 2,650 jobs in our state that depend on federal research funding tied to UConn and UCHC.
These federal measures erode and disregard academic freedom, disciplines that promote equity and diversity and community health.
In closing, we strongly and passionately urge our lawmakers to act now and convene a special session of the General Assembly to:
Support the University of Connecticut Health Center, the state’s only public hospital, as we step up to meet the growing demands of patients as more and more become uninsured; and
Allocate funds to UConn and UCHC to offset state and federal cuts, especially for essential but stigmatized research and patient care to the most vulnerable.
The authors comprise the executive committee of the University of Connecticut Health Center – American Association of University Professors (UCHC-AAUP), AFT Local 6747, which represents nearly 700 faculty at UConn Health. They are: Ion Moraru, MD, PhD, UCHC-AAUP President; Neena Qasba, MD, MPH, Vice President; Mark Maciejewski, PhD, Secretary-Treasurer; Michael Baldwin, MD; Irina Bezsonova, PhD; Ruchir Trivedi, MD; Alix Deymier, PhD; and Laura Haynes, PhD.
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Green shoots in dementia’s desert
Sep 24, 2025
First, let me say I am not a neurologist or a neuroscientist, but I worked in a Pathology and Cell Biology Department where I had colleagues who were both of those things. I went to their seminars and their graduate students’ Ph.D defenses. I taught in a course on cell biology and histology where neuroscience was a major subject. The College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia teaches serious basic science to its medical and graduate students. I followed neuroscience for years, not knowing I would write about it.
In the previous column we established that progress with dementia and other neurological diseases had been depressingly slow. No new treatments for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases had been introduced in years. Then, a few green shoots appeared in this desert. The first (for me) was a population study that suggested the people who had been vaccinated for shingles were 20% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than unvaccinated peers. Such studies are called Natural Experiments. There is no effort to intervene, but patterns are still observed. Charles Darwin’s observations, mostly natural experiments, led to the theory of evolution, which is the organizing concept of biology.
The second study with a weight reduction and anti-diabetes drug slowed but did not stop the shrinkage of the brains of patients in the early stages of Alzheimer dementia. More news on such drugs, which are being tested in interventional studies should be forthcoming.
The third study involves two papers from Harvard Medical School and took a molecular approach which concentrated on the genes that are turned on or off in brain neurons as dementia begins and proceeds. Proteins that turn genes on or off are part of the intellectual heartland of molecular biology and thus reassuring to people like me; we know how to do this. After many experiments the Harvard scientists arrived at a compound called lithium orotate, which we will leave hanging while I tell you about mice with Alzheimer’s disease.
Humans, mice, other mammals, and even fruit flies have brains with specific regions devoted to various tasks: sight, small, hearing, short-term memory, long term memory, reasoning, and many others.
A mouse neuron is hard to distinguish from a human neuron under a microscope.We can now introduce mutations into mice that cause human diseases, whether spinal muscular atrophy, cystic fibrosis or dementia, which allows us to study the disease in an animal; this is a sort of biological bootstrapping.Mice live two years and dementia appears early in animals carrying these mutations. They lose their memories and can no longer locate where they are in a maze. We can do experiments on mice that would be ethically impossible in humans. (There are strict rules on minimizing pain for animals and a staff of animal care people and veterinarians to maintain the facility and instruct graduate students and other workers in the proper use of animals.)A research university like Columbia or Harvard may house 80,000 or more mice for the study of various disease conditions.
In our Alzheimer mice, tau and beta-amyloid (both proteins; sequences of amino acids) are overproduced, as in humans with Alzheimer’s disease. Some human patients have high amounts of tau and beta-amyloid but are cognitively normal. These proteins are part of the disease process, but do not cause it. Something else must occur for the neurons to progress to the full disease. According to scientists in the Yanker lab at Harvard Medical School, beta amyloid protein binds to lithium and takes it out of circulation.(Lithium, a small element, has been used in psychiatry for a long time.)
...Progress with dementia and other neurological diseases has been depressingly slow. No new treatments for Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases have been introduced in years. Then, a few green shoots appeared in this desert.
What is the consequence of sequestering lithium?The neurons (and the mice) progress to the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease: the brain continues to shrink, synapses and cognitive functions disappear.Would more lithium in the mouse drinking water help preserve neurons? Yes,at least in mice.Positively charged lithium bound to a negatively charged organic molecule called orotate is the most effective formulation.
Three years ago, some of the same authors discovered a protein complex called REST that acts to suppress the expression of genes involved in late Alzheimer’s disease. If a cell makes a lot of REST, it does not progress to full dementia, much as if one gives it lithium orotate. Lithium orotate and REST are called checkpoint regulators, well known in other biological processes. The authors of this paper put the case this way: ‘Here we show that endogenous lithium (Li) is dynamically regulated in the brain and contributes to cognitive preservation during ageing.’
None of these potential treatments: Herpes zoster vaccination, anti-diabetes/weight loss compounds, or lithium orotate, in variations or combinations, is guaranteed to be therapeutic; mice are not humans after all, but after years of frustration, it is a relief to try new approaches.
Richard Kessin, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
Editor’s Note: The Yanker laboratory at Harvard Medical School, which did these studies, lost much of its funding in the recent NIH cuts.
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