Thursday morning, October 1, 2026 – Westminster Hall, MSU Bloomfield Campus – 9:30 a.m. – Dr. Melissa Benbow Flowers, Scholar-in-Residence at Sprague Library of Montclair State University and Mellon Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow, American Conservation Experience, convenes the opening session of her ambitious conference — Reclaiming the Narrative — to explore “how we can recover and share the histories of working-class people and other communities whose experiences are often-underrepresented in archives and pubic educational spaces.”
The roundtable-discussion group pictured here are about to address the topic of Centering Indigenous Histories.
To Dr. Flowers’ left: Raynaldo St. Bernard, Executive Student Tutor/ Mentor Coordinator, Bloomfield College; Prof. Chris Matthews, panel moderator, co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at MSU; Brianna Dagostino, member, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, and educator, Millville High School; Laura J. Allen, Curator of Native American Art and Reparation Coordinator at the Montclair Art Museum; and Precious Benally, citizen of the Navajo Nation, and Director of the New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice at MSU.
Three more provocative, wide-ranging presentations made for a memorable day – Unveiled: The Narrative of a Predominantly Black Institution; Centering Place and People with the New Jersey Black Heritage Trail; and Doing the Work of Public History in Museums and Community Organizations.