Indigenous Peoples the focus of annual Justine L. Hommel Memorial Lecture
Published on:
July 1, 2026
Historian Richard Sears Walling will speak on the Indigenous Peoples of the Catskills. Image: MTHS.
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HAINES FALLS―The 2026 Justine L. Hommel Memorial Lecture, an annual history program of the Mountain Top Historical Society in honor its founder, will take place on July 18 at 2 p.m., in the Twilight Park Clubhouse at 2 Ledge End Road, Haines Falls.
Historian Richard Sears Walling will speak on the Indigenous Peoples of the Catskills. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Twilight Inn fire, Town of Hunter Historian Dede Terns-Thorpe will offer a remembrance of those who perished in that devastating fire in 1926. To start the program off, in honor of the 250th Anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, there will be a reading out loud of parts of the Declaration of Independence.
In a preview of his talk, Walling noted, “Humanity has shared the Catskills for nearly twelve-thousand years, beginning with Paleo-Indians who survived on the natural resources of the mountains. Over millennia, these small family groupings saw the arrival of others. The Algonquian people migrated into the region from the west and were very present in the Catskill and Hudson valleys and developed into the Lenape, Mohican and related tribes.”
“Meanwhile the Iroquois people dominated along the Mohawk and western Catskills having ancestrally developed in the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes region. Mr. Walling will present an overview of the dynamism of this indigenous transformation and also speak about efforts to save a Mohican village site in Leeds from being destroyed by modern development,” Walling added.
To register, email mthsdirector@mths.org.
