We Are Still Here!
“We Are Still Here!” Lunaapeew/Lenape Celebration Weekend celebrates New York’s First People with Native American music and dance, craft workshops, a marketplace, and talks with Indigenous artists; at the Museum of the City of New York in “El Barrio” East Harlem; on Saturday-Sunday, May 4-5, 2024, from 11am-4pm. FREE, but registration recommended. 🇺🇸
If you are Native American, Indigenous of the Americas, or run with these communities, you can’t help but notice how similar we are. Pre-colonizer traditions are very similar around the world. A Native American pow wow is basically the same as an Indigenous Taíno areíto; an Amazonian Indigenous community gathering; any of the Latin drum, song, and dance traditions such as Cuban rumba, Colombian cumbia, or Puerto Rican bomba; African community gatherings, and even European pagan traditions.
When the work is done, we get together and call the ancestors to be with us. Then the drumming starts, the singing starts, and the dancing starts. Storytellers tell the heroic deeds of our peoples. People sell food and crafts. We teach our children who they are. Young people look for love. It was the same everywhere, since the beginning of people time.
Festival Participants
- Red Blanket Singers drum circle
- Tchin master storyteller
- We Are the Seeds musicians and dancers
- Kristin Jacobs (Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit) teaches Munsee words
- Lenape Youth Leaders lead Lenape games
- A Lunaapeew/Lenape panel of elders talks about the impact of colonization and their hopes for the future
Reconnecting With the People of the Land
Indigenous Peoples are people of the land who live in a symbiotic relationship with Mother Earth.
The Museum of the City of New York is looking back at the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Dutch settlers to what is now New York City in 1624. Things went okay at first, and the Lenape even helped the settlers. But theft of Lenape land, the takeover of Lenape trade businesses, and violence made relations turn bad until the Lenape were forced out of Manhattan.
A settler trick is to stop counting Indigenous Peoples in their census, so they could tell their European masters that everything was fine, and avoid responsibility for their own thievery and violence. But we didn’t die out. Some of us moved, some of us married, but we are still here. The land never forgets.
Today, there are Lenape communities in New Jersey, Long Island, and further afield in Canada and Oklahoma. Delaware is a European name for the Lenape.
This festival is part of the Museum’s Eenda-Lunaapeewahkiing (EL) project to reconnect with the First Peoples, the First Nations, including:
- Munsee-Delaware National of Ontario, Canada
- Nanticoke Lenni Lenape Tribal Nation of Bridgeton, New Jersey
- Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation of Mahwah, New Jersey
- Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit (Moravian of the Thames Band) of Ontario, Canada
This is part of an exhibition now opening at the Amsterdam Museum in the Netherlands, that will come to the Museum of the City of New York in 2025.
So ya, we are still here ~ Íiyach Ktapihna!