John A. Strong, of Southampton, professor, Native Nations historian, dies at 89

John A. Strong, a historian and professor from Southampton who chronicled the culture and deep roots of Long Island’s Native Nations, died Wednesday. The professor emeritus in history and American studies at Long Island University was 89.

Strong, who wrote extensively about Long Island’s tribes, from the Montaukett to the Unkechaug and Shinnecock nations, lived most of his life in Southampton, where he taught for 33 years at LIU's campus. He moved in recent years to Silver Spring, Maryland, to be near his daughter Lisa Strong, an art historian at Georgetown University whose career was inspired by her father.

The cause of his death, she said in an interview Thursday, was complications of septic shock following a kidney stone.

“He loved life and he loved his research,” Lisa Strong said. “He was very, very committed politically, and he was highly motivated by that intersection between his research and political change … that you could change things in the present by understanding or knowing your past.”

He was active in protests during the 1960s and '70s against the Vietnam War, nuclear power, and, while working for Patchogue public schools, the former Woolworth's store there after the chain refused to serve Black customers at its Southern lunch counters, according to a 1974 profile in a Southampton college newspaper. 

Strong was born Oct. 3, 1935, in upstate Cooperstown, and grew up in nearby Schuyler Lake with his identical twin sisters. The family lived a rural life, milking cows, raising chickens and a horse in a barn, his daughter said.

“He was always interested in history,” Lisa Strong said. After graduate studies at Syracuse University he eventually made his way to Long Island to teach, and there met the woman who became his wife, Jane, who, like him, was teaching in Patchogue public schools. Jane Strong, who went on to work for the Higher Education Opportunity Program in Southampton, where she tutored students and helped prepare them for college, died in 2017, Lisa Strong said.

The couple often hosted students who didn’t have a place to stay for the summer. “He was always curious about people and loved people and wanted to know their history,” Lisa Strong said of her father.

Strong’s work on Long Island Native cultures and history was instrumental in expanding that knowledge and aiding Native Nations seeking to affirm or restore their recognized status. That included most recently assisting the Montaukett Indian Nation’s effort to restore their state recognition. Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed the legislation in the waning days of December, her third and the sixth by the state in the past decade, but it has since been reintroduced, with some language written by Strong.

Despite his age and frail health in recent years, Strong also worked as an expert witness in a case that seeks to affirm the Shinnecock Nation’s aboriginal fishing rights. In January 2024, he completed a 46-page paper in support of the case, brought on behalf of three Shinnecock fishermen.

Strong was “an icon ... a huge part of our think tanks,” said Taobi Silva, a former Shinnecock leader who is a named plaintiff in the fishing rights case.

Strong's death is a “tremendous, tremendous loss,” said Shinnecock Nation Vice Chairman Lance Gumbs. “The history and the knowledge that man had can never be replaced.”

Strong earned a bachelor’s degree in politics and history from St. Lawrence University in upstate Canton in 1957, and a master's in international relations from Syracuse University. He traveled the world for years before earning a doctorate in social science from Syracuse in 1967.

He served as a Fulbright lecturer/consultant at the University of Miskolc in Hungary from 1998 to 2000. While there, he led students on a research project to investigate ethnic relations and identity among ethnic Romani and Hungarians, his daughter said.

Strong also served as associate director of Cornell University’s Black Studies Workshop. He was trained in African history, his daughter said, but at Southampton gradually shifted his focus to Indigenous studies.

Strong joined Long Island University in 1965, after serving as a teaching assistant at Syracuse University and a public school teacher in Patchogue. He had a two-year stint starting in 1961 at what is now Birzeit University in the West Bank. He became a full professor at Long Island University in 1978, and a professor emeritus upon his retirement from the Southampton campus in 1998. The campus is now operated by Stony Brook University.

“His mind never failed him no matter how physically impaired he was,” said Harry Wallace, chief of the Unkechaug Nation on the Poospatuck territory in Mastic, who has known Strong since the 1980s.

Thousands of pages of Strong’s work in a 2009 federal case involving the Unkechaug Nation ultimately became a book about the tribe, and Strong and Wallace’s jointly compiled research helped establish the tribe’s status as a federal common law nation with sovereign immunity.

Sandi Brewster-walker, executive director of the Montaukett Indian Nation, called Strong a “great friend and a friend of the Montauketts” who provided crucial historical context for the nation’s more than decadelong quest to restore its state recognition.

In addition to his daughter Lisa, Strong is survived by his daughter Lara Strong, of Budapest, Hungary, and five grandchildren.

Strong will be cremated and the family plans a service on Tuesday, Feb. 11, at 10 a.m. at the Riderwood Chapel in Silver Spring, Maryland.

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.