Exhibition Opening: Full Conversation
From January 20 to April 30, 2022, the Brooklyn Public Library and The Lenape Center presented "Lenapehoking," the Lenape name for the homeland, an exhibition of masterworks by Lenape artists past and present. Here, visitors encountered never-before-seen beaded bandolier bags from the 1800s, a newly created turkey feather cape, three tapestries made of Purple Kingsessing for a rematriation project in the Hudson Valley. For the first time ever, a Lenape-curated exhibition featuring masterworks from the native people of the New York Harbor region opened in NYC.
Exhibition Opening: Short Version
Joe Baker on curating the Lenapehoking exhibition
The History of Lenape Forced Removals
On February 23, 2022, as part of the Lenapehoking exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library, the Lenape Center’s Curtis Zunigha and Joe Baker, and Indigenous historian Heather Bruegl discussed forced removals of the Lenape people from their northeastern homeland, in a conversation moderated by Dr. Tibi Galis, Executive Director of the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities.
Lenapehoking: On Beads & Seeds
On March 8, 2022, as part of the Lenapehoking exhibition and talks, Brooklyn Public Library featured this video on beads and seeds, and the story they tell about the Lenape, their history, and their survivance.
Lenapehoking: Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Persons
On March 14, 2022, as part of the Lenapehoking exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library, a panel addressed the crisis of violence, often gender-based, against Native Peoples. The panel featured members of Nichusak (“my women friends”), a working group of extraordinary activists and lawyers created by Lenape Center to address the crisis, including Gloria Steinem, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Heather Bruegl, Caroline LaPorte, and Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, working to bring justice to this pressing human rights issue. Other group members who worked on a MMIPW report included Chelsea Kimura, Rebecca Lowry, and Cardozo law students, Brett Jones and Sheryl Wallin.
The Tenacious Myth of the Purchase of Manhattan
On March 24, 2022, as part of the Lenapehoking exhibit at Brooklyn Public Library, the Lenape Center’s Joe Baker and Hadrien Coumans with indigenous lawyer and playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle disputed, corrected and updated the long-held and false narrative of the Dutch purchase of Manhattan from the Lenape.
The Singing Woods: A Conversation with Brent Michael Davids
On April 6, 2022, as part of the Lenapehoking exhibition, Brooklyn Public Library and Lenape Center featured a pre-recorded conversation with Davids by Dr. Jessica Bissett Perea, on Davids's work as a composer, followed by a live question-and-answer session.
Indigenous Poetry Series: Rebecca Haff Lowry
On April 12, 2022, in this multi-part series, BPL Presents featured Indigenous poets from across the continent who explore the art of poetry. In this episode, in conjunction with the Lenapehoking Exhibition, the series featured Lenape poet Rebecca Haff Lowry.
Lenapehoking: Painter Ahchipaptunhe (David L. Haff) on His Work
On April 29, 2022, as part of the Lenapehoking exhibition, Phoenix, Arizona-based Lenape visual artist Ahchipaptunhe (David L. Haff) presented a guided immersion into his abstractionist paintings and the questions of history and identity it evokes. In this talk, Ahchipaptunhe weaves together his life and art during his presentation, with guest critic Joyce Beckentstein responding to the work following the artist’s presentation.
Returning Lenape Seeds to the Homeland
On April 14, 2022, as part of the Lenapehoking exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library, participants from Farm Hub and the Lenape Center discussed the return of Lenape seeds to the homeland. The Seed Rematriation Garden was a collaborative project between the Lenape Center, whose mission was to continue Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland, through community, culture, and the arts.
Lenapehoking Plant Medicine
On April 21, 2022, as part of the Lenapehoking exhibition on display at Greenpoint Library, the Lenape Center’s Curtis Zunigha and Brooklyn-based herbalist Liz Neves discussed plants used in traditional healing practices of the Lenape people. They examined the use of medicinal plants in both a historical and modern context, including ceremonies, wildcrafting practices, and making medicine with plants that grow throughout New York City/Lenapehoking.
The Land We're On: Living Lenapehoking (A Lenapehoking Anthology Launch On March 23, 2023, the Lenape Center and Brooklyn Public Library presented the Manhattan launch of the Lenapehoking Anthology, a collection of essays, poems, artwork and interviews by and about tribal members from the Lenape community. A free PDF of the anthology can be downloaded here)
Teaching Lenape History & Presence in New York City Schools
On Nov 18, 2024, the Brooklyn Public Library, in collaboration with the Lenape Center, presented a talk to introduce and discuss a new Lenape curriculum developed for PK-12 students. The curriculum aims to bring Indigenous history to life and address the often overlooked narrative of the Lenape people in New York City. The talk featured key contributors to the curriculum project, including Rachel Talbert from Teachers College, Columbia University; Joe Baker, Executive Director of Lenape Center and Hadrien Coumans, Deputy Director of Lenape Center. Adapted in part from the Lenape Center’s Lenapehoking Anthology, the Lenape curriculum is designed for students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, with four different installments tailored to specific age groups. It aims to provide a comprehensive and age-appropriate approach to teaching Lenape history and culture.
Aholkwësichikv (“Beloved Ones”) Screening & Talkback with Chief Brad Killscrow & Lenape Center
On Feb 11, 2026,BPL Presents welcomed filmmaker Julia Sy, along with Brad Killscrow—chief of the Delaware Tribe of Indians—Joe Baker and Hadrien Coumans of Lenape Center as they presented Aholkwësichikv: Beloved Ones, a documentary short in conversation with Lenape elders. In 2025, filmmaker Julia Sy interviewed Lenape elders Joe Baker, Chief Brad Killscrow, Mike Pace, Curtis Zuniga, Annette Ketchum and Paula Pechonick to discuss the erasure of Lenape history. The Lenape are the original people of New York City and their homeland, Lenapehoking, once sprawled across the tri-state area, covering lower New York State, including all of New York City, the entirety of New Jersey, the eastern third of Pennsylvania, and portions of Delaware and Connecticut. In this conversation, filmed in Bartlesvile, seat of the Delaware Tribe of Indians today, the elders gather to recall the history of Lenape forced removals and broken treaties, and their ongoing resilience. Their saga covers many places where the U.S. government planned to settle them, as they were continuously moved westward as US government priorities arose. The film also addresses the current U.S. climate and how it threatens to further erase Lenape culture, history and heritage.
Back to Manahatta: A Documentary Short
Lenapehoking: An Anthem
Lenapehoking
An Anthem for Lenape Center
Participants in Lenapehoking
Joe Baker (curator) is an artist, educator, curator and activist who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past thirty years. He is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and co-founder executive director of Lenape Center in Manhattan. Baker is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work in New York and was recently Visiting Professor of Museum Studies at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado. He serves as a board member for The Endangered Language Fund, Yale University and on the Advisory Committee for the National Public Art Consortium, New York and cultural advisor for the new CBS Series, “Ghosts.”
Baker has guided in his capacity as executive director for Lenape Center partnerships with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (his work is currently on exhibit there), Brooklyn Museum of Art, American Ballet Theater, Moulin Rouge on Broadway, The Whitney Museum of Art, and others. In partnership with Farm Hub in the Hudson River Valley, Baker and Lenape Center are championing the return of ancestral seeds in the homeland through a seed rematriation project. This seed saving project, now in its second year, has done much to contribute to the cultural foodways of the Lenape diaspora. In partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, Baker is the curator of the first ever Lenape exhibition of cultural arts in the City of New York, opening January 2021. Baker graduated from the University of Tulsa with a BFA degree in Design and an MFA in painting and drawing, and completed postgraduate study, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, MDP Program.
Heather Bruegl (panelist, anthology), a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and first line descendent Stockbridge Munsee, is a graduate of Madonna University in Michigan and holds a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in U.S. History. Inspired by a trip to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, a passion for Native American History was born. She has spoken for numerous groups including the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the College of the Menominee Nation. She has spoken at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh for Indigenous Peoples Day 2017. Heather also opened and spoke at the Women’s March Anniversary in Lansing, Michigan in January 2018. She also spoke at the first ever Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, DC in January of 2019. In the summer 2019, virtually in 2020 and in 2021, she spoke at the Crazy Horse Memorial and Museum in Custer, South Dakota for their Talking Circle Series. She has also become the ‘’accidental activist’’ and speaks to different groups about intergenerational racism and trauma and helps to bring awareness to our environment, the fight for clean water and other issues in the Native community. A curiosity of her own heritage led her to Wisconsin, where she has researched the history of the Native American tribes in the area. She is the former Director of Cultural Affairs for the Stockbridge-Munsee Community and now serves at the Director of Education for Forge Project. In addition to that she also currently travels and speaks on Native American history, including policy and activism.
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Margie Cook is a current graduate student in the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University. She works for BPL Presents, the Arts and Culture arm of the Brooklyn Public Library, where she has led and supported programs aimed at promoting cultural inclusivity through the free exchange of knowledge.
Hadrien Coumans is Co-founder & co-Director of Lenape Center, and an adopted member of the WhiteTurkey-Fugate family.
Brent Michael Davids is a professional concert and film composer, co-director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan, and an American Indian citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation. As an American Indian Music Specialist, Davids is in demand as an Educator and Consultant for Films, Television, Schools, Festivals, Seminars and Workshops. Davids is a master performer of American Indian instruments and styles, and a designer of original music instruments.
Davids’ composer career spans 45 years, with multiple awards. Davids holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Music Composition from Northern Illinois University (1981) and Arizona State University (1992) respectively, trained at Redford’s Sundance Institute, and apprenticed with film composer Stephen Warbeck (Shakespeare In Love). He has garnered the Distinguished Alumni Awards from both of the universities he attended, NIU (1996) and ASU (2004).
In 2015, the prestigious Indian Summer Music Festival awarded Davids its “Lifetime Achievement Award.” In 2011, the “Dakota Music Tour” featured 4 concerts of Davids' orchestral works, performed by the Mankato Symphony and the Dakota drum group Maza Kute. That same year, Davids conducted a month-long tour of Russia, lecturing and performing, sponsored by the US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission. In 2009, Davids was featured on a SDPB-TV network special, following multiple road trip performances of his “Black Hills Olowan” by South Dakota Symphony and the famed Porcupine Singers (Lakota).
Davids’ work, “Powwow Symphony,” was premiered by New Mexico Symphony (1999), Phoenix Symphony (2002), and Mankato Symphony (2011) to rave reviews. Commissioned by the National Symphony, his “Canyon Sunrise” (1996) premiered at the Kennedy Center to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the Kennedy Center and the 60th Anniversary of the NSO.
Davids has worked extensively in the choral field, often featured as a clinician for conventions, such as his work with Chanticleer at the 6th Annual World Choral Symposium, Minneapolis (2003). In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts named Davids among the nation’s most celebrated choral composers in its project “American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.” Davids has also been commissioned by Grammy Award-winning Chanticleer, for “Night Chant” (1997), “Mohican Soup” (1999), “Un-Covered Wagon” (2003), and “Leather Stocking” (2012).
Davids’ works employ traditional Native American instruments and often instruments of his own design, including a soprano quartz flute (1989), bass quartz flute (1991), and a dozen other percussion devices that chirp or whistle. With an expert hand, he fashions ink manuscripts that are themselves visual works of art, visually beautiful manuscripts that are performable as written sheet music.
As an Educator, Davids co-founded the award-winning Native American Composer Apprentice Program in AZ (2000), and founded the Composer Apprentice National Outreach Endeavor in MN and WI (2005), to teach indigenous youth to compose their own written music.
K Greene is a seed being. His seed journey began twenty years ago with starting the first seed library in a public library in the country. Four years later, K and his partner Doug Muller turned the library into the Hudson Valley Seed Co. From there K, Rowen White, and the Hudson Valley Farm Hub partnered to begin seed rematriation work with the Mohawk community in Akwesasne and more recently, the Lenape Center. Along with continuing these cultural seed relationships, K is developing a non-binary approach to botany as well as creating a seedshed map of the Hudson Valley region. K continues to provide trainings to new seed libraries, teach seed saving skills, and enjoys meeting new plants every season.
Stewart Huntington is a filmmaker and reporter for Indian Country Today whose work explores the cultural, jurisdictional and economic borderlands between Indian Country and broader U.S. communities. His current project examines the rise of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians from near extermination in 1866 at the hands of a California State-financed militia to major 21st Century economic and philanthropic presence in Southern California’s Inland Empire.
Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum (Working Group, panelist) is Associate Professor of Clinical Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law where she directs the Benjamin B. Ferencz Human Rights and Atrocity Prevention Clinic and the Cardozo Law Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights (CLIHHR). Jocelyn’s scholarship focuses on human rights, public health, and atrocity prevention, especially related to preventing and responding to sexual and gender-based crimes, slavery and the slave trade, Indigenous rights, and human rights violations against minority groups. She holds a JD from Cornell Law School and an MPH from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Chelsea Kimura is a direct descendant of the Iñupiat people of Northern Alaskan. She is a licensed social worker currently working as a Behavior Health Patient Navigator for the Native American Rehabilitation Association in Portland, Oregon. Her current role is focused on cancer prevention and care, trauma-informed care, and advocacy for Native communities. She currently serves as the liaison for the Lenape Center’s MMIP group. She is a graduate of the University of Oregon’s B.S. in Family and Human Services program and received her Master’s in Social Work degree from Columbia University.
Caroline LaPorte (Immediate Descendant Little River Band of Ottawa Indians) is an Associate Judge at the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, an attorney and judicial advisor to Tribal Court of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and is the Director of the Tribal Safe Housing Center at the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center. Caroline previously served as NIWRC's Senior Native Affairs Policy Advisor. She graduated from the University of Miami School of Law, where she was named a Henry Bandier Fellow, and received the Natasha Pettigrew Memorial Award for her time as a fellow in the Children and Youth Law Clinic. Caroline's work focuses primarily on housing, human rights, children, firearms, and criminal justice focused within the gender-based violence framework. She serves on the American Bar Association's Victims Rights Task Force, co-chairs the Victim’s Committee for the Criminal Justice Section of the ABA, is a member of the Lenape Center’s MMIW Task Force, on the Board of Directors for StrongHearts Native Helpline as well as the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, is a founding member of the National Working Group on Safe Housing for American Indians and Alaska Natives, and is an adjunct instructor at the University of Miami teaching Native and Indigenous studies.
Rebecca Haff Lowry (artist of turkey feather cape, poet, Working Group) is a citizen of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, headquartered in Bartlesville, OK. Rebecca is an educator, social worker, poet and Lenape feather weaver. Her creation, The Cape of a Matriarch, is displayed in the Lenapehoking exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library through April 2022. In partnership with Tribes, she develops decolonial curriculum for classes elementary-college on Indigenous world views, creative writing and social-emotional skills. Her anthology of poetry, Lenape Journeys, was publicly performed on Little Island, in Manhattan, last July. A children’s book featuring lessons of feather weaving is in development. Rebecca serves on the Advisory Council of the Lenape Center.
Sandra Lowry (artist of turkey feather cape), born and raised on the Yurok Reservation, still lives in the heartland of her ancestral people in Northern California. She has lived in the arms of her culture and has created many, many items of ceremonial regalia that will help carry medicine long after her time on the land has ended. Sandra is blessed to have three children and four grandsons.
Mary Kathryn Nagle (Working Group, panelist) is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She is also a partner at Pipestem and Nagle Law, P.C., where she works to protect tribal sovereignty and the inherent right of Indian Nations to protect their women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault. From 2015 to 2019, she served as the first Executive Director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program. Nagle is an alum of the 2013 Public Theater Emerging Writers Program. Productions include Miss Lead (Amerinda, 59E59), Fairly Traceable (Native Voices at the Autry), Sovereignty (Arena Stage), Manahatta (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Return to Niobrara (Rose Theater), and Crossing Mnisose (Portland Center Stage), Sovereignty (Marin Theatre Company), and Manahatta (Yale Repertory Theatre). She has received commissions from Arena Stage, the Rose Theater (Omaha, Nebraska), Portland Center Stage, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Yale Repertory Theatre, Round House Theater, and Oregon Shakespeare Theater.
Liz Neves is an herbal educator, dream guide, meditation instructor, and author of Northeast Medicinal Plants: Identify, Harvest, and Use 111 Wild Herbs for Health and Wellness (Timber Press). For over 12 years she has shared her knowledge of herbal self care and medicine making with city dwellers. She leads online and in-person herbalism courses and plant walks in Prospect Park, Brooklyn through her educational platform Gathering Ground.
Steven Newcomb (anthology)--Shawnee/ Edmonds family) /Lenape (Newcomb & Tionganoxie families)--is director of the Indigenous Law Institute, which he founded with his friend and mentor Birgil Kills Straight (1940-2019) (Oglala Lakota) as part of a spiritual movement to address the injustices of U.S. federal Indian law and policy. For four decades, he has been studying and writing about U.S. federal Indian law and policy. He contrasts the ecological and spiritual wisdom of original nations and peoples with the patterns of domination and dehumanization used against Indigenous nations and peoples on the basis of the Vatican papal bulls from the fifteenth century. Many of his findings are found in his book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (2008), and he co-produced a documentary “The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking the Domination Code, directed by Sheldon Wolfchild (Dakota) based on his book Pagans. On May 4, 2016, he was part of an Indigenous peoples’ delegation that met Pope Francis at St. Peter’s Square. They spent two hours meeting with Archbishop Tomasi at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace to advocate for the revocation of 15th-century papal bulls of domination. Newcomb also teaches how the knowledge and wisdom systems of Original Nations and Peoples lead to the insight that Life-is-Energy and Love-of-Life, and that this insight is the deeper purpose of our existence. He shares the ways in which the languages of Original Nations and Peoples are oriented toward energy, vibration, and processes, and how our ancient languages were evolved by our ancestors for prayerful and spiritual communication. He can be reached at info@originalfreenations.com. Please visit the website http://www.originalfreenations.com.
Dr. Jessica Bissett Perea is an interdisciplinary musician-scholar whose research, teaching, and service priorities are informed by her lived experiences and academic training. She was born in Dgheyaytnu, or what is currently known as Anchorage, Alaska, and raised on her ancestral Dena’ina homelands forty miles north in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. She is an enrolled member of the Knik Tribe and a shareholder in Cook Inlet Region, Inc. (an Alaska Native Corporation). She is a double bassist and vocalist and earned a Bachelors degree in Music Education, a Masters degree in Music History, and a Ph.D. in Musicology.
Jessica’s current projects include: co-directing the “Radical and Relational Approaches to Food Fermentation and Food Security” project in partnership with researchers from Ilisimatusarfik Kalaallit Nunaat (Nuuk, Greenland); and co-convening an Asia-Pacific Indigenous Studies seminar in partnership with researchers from Universiti Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) and the APRU (Association of Pacific Rim) Indigenous Knowledges Working Group. Her book Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (Oxford University Press, 2021) delves into histories of Inuit musical life across a range of genres—from hip hop to Christian hymnody and drumsongs to funk and R&B—to amplify the broader significance of sound as integral to Indigenous self-determination and resurgence movements.
With her husband, ethnomusicologist and musician John-Carlos Perea, Jessica is currenty raising two small children on xučyun, or unceded Chocenyo Ohlone lands, also known as Berkeley, California; and she currently works on Putah-toi, or unceded Patwin lands occupied by the University of California, Davis, as an Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor in Native American Studies.
Jim Rementer, language project director, began his study of the Lenape or Delaware language in the summer of 1961. He returned the following summer and resumed his study with James H. Thompson, one of the oldest tribal members. After Mr. Thompson’s death in 1964, Jim continued his study primarily with Nora Thompson Dean, daughter of James Thompson. Some of the other people he worked with over the years were Lucy Parks Blalock, Fred Fall-Leaf, Freddie Washington, Leonard Thompson, Anna Davis, Reuben Wilson, and Tom Wilson. He has also worked with tribal elders among the Western Delawares.
Gloria Steinem (Working Group, panelist) is an American activist, journalist, and leader in the global feminist movement. Steinem contributed to feminism internationally as a writer, lecturer, organizer, and media spokeswoman on the issues of equality. At the age of 87, she continues her work towards a more just world through her support of seasoned and budding activists and organizations, such as the Women’s Media Center, the ERA Coalition, and Equality Now. She is a co-founder of Ms. Magazine.
Photo by Carly Romeo
Sam Van Aken is a contemporary artist who works beyond traditional modes of artmaking, crossing artistic genres and disciplines to develop new perspectives on such themes as agriculture, botany, climatology, memory, and the ever-increasing impact of technology. Van Aken’s works in the natural and public realm are seen as metaphors that serve as the basis of narrative, sites of place making, collective learning, and in some cases have even become the basis of scientific research.
Curtis Zunigha is co-founder and co-director of The Lenape Center, based in New York City, which promotes the history and culture of the Lenape people (also known as Delaware Indians) through the arts, humanities, social identity, and environmental activism. His multimedia experience includes writing, producing, directing, acting, narrating, and composing/performing traditional music. Zunigha is an accomplished public speaker, workshop facilitator, and panel moderator. He is known throughout Indian Country as a master of ceremonies at cultural performances and events.