Lenape Hymnal Becomes Language Revival Tool at NYC Museum — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- The Museum of the City of New York opened "Halumii Ktapihna: Lenape Legacies and Futures," running through April 17, 2027, with Lenape art, traditional dress, music samples, and language-revitalization work by the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective.
- An 1874 Toronto missionary hymnal that translated Christian worship songs into Munsee — originally a tool of forced assimilation — now serves as a primary source for vocabulary and grammar instruction, teaching the language it once helped kill.
- The US government funded more than 500 Indian boarding schools in the 19th century to forcibly assimilate Native children; at least 1,000 children died in the system, and President Joe Biden issued a formal apology only in 2024, calling it "one of the most horrific chapters in American history."
- The widely repeated origin story that the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Lenape for $24 in trinkets is apocryphal: there is no paper record of the transaction, and the Lenape did not believe land could be owned or sold, according to most scholars cited in the article.
- Brent Stonefish, a founding member of the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective and curatorial adviser on the project, brought his daughter Emma, who is coordinating a Lenape/Lunáapeew Nations Pow Wow in Brooklyn's Prospect Park that resumed last year after a 53-year break.
- Curator Angel "Monxo" López, who is Puerto Rican-born and Bronx-based, said he expected "a lot of resentment" walking into the project but found the exhibit engages them "in ways that are not ugly, nasty, or resent-driven."
- The exhibit features a 2019 protest banner by Georgetown professor Ashton Pemapanik Dunkley linking the climate crisis to missing and murdered Indigenous women; the article notes more than 1.5 million Indigenous women have experienced violence in their lifetimes.
Why it matters: The exhibit, running through April 2027, reframes an 1874 assimilation hymnal as a Munsee-language revival tool — a tangible counter-narrative to the assumption that Lenape history in New York ended centuries ago. For state- and federally recognized Lenape communities in the US and Canada, the museum's platform amplifies ongoing cultural sovereignty efforts already backed by tribal governments and land-buyback grants.
Ask SkimNews
