Troutbeck Symposium comes to Salisbury

SALISBURY — Student projects from the recent Troutbeck Symposium were on display at the Salisbury Association’s Academy Building for a couple of weeks after the main event.

The Troutbeck Symposium focused on aspects of local history often overlooked, particularly as they relate to Indigenous communities and communities of color.

The schools involved were Salisbury Central School, Salisbury School, Housatonic Valley Regional High School, and North Canaan Elementary School.

The latter’s efforts were described as such:

“The eighth-grade students at North Canaan Elementary School created these tiles to depict, through art, the tools, costumes and cultural traditions of Connecticut’s Indigenous tribes. Their goal is to tribute to and raise awareness of the rich history of the Indigenous peoples who have inhabited and protected this land for generations.”

Other exhibits included original poetry from Salisbury Central School students. Entries from HVRHS included a look at the civil rights movement in popular culture, a discussion of the participants in the 1916 Amenia Conference, held at Troutbeck by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a discussion of how race was treated by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

One of the HVRHS projects was on Dolores Branch James-Johnson, a 1952 graduate of HVRHS and longtime employee of Salisbury Central School who became active in the Civil Rights movement. She marched with Martin Luther King Jr. to Washington, in the Selma-Montgomery March in 1965, and was highly active in Concern, a local Civil Rights organization.

Salisbury School’s projects were in video form, including Tino Harper and DJ Duntz on “The Brotherhood of Black Hair.” The videos can be seen on YouTube under “Coloring Our Past.”