NYC Museum Exhibit Reclaims Lenape History and Language — SkimNews
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- Halumii Ktapihna: Lenape Legacies and Futures opened at the Museum of the City of New York and runs through April 17, 2027, featuring Lenape visual art, traditional dress, music, and language revitalization efforts across more than 150 years of materials.
- An 1874 Toronto missionary hymnal translating Christian worship songs into Munsee — originally designed to strip Lenape children of their language — now serves as a primary source for revitalizing Munsee, a complete inversion of its original purpose.
- The exhibit contextualizes the US government's 19th-century Indian boarding school system, where at least 1,000 children died, and notes that Joe Biden issued a formal apology in 2024 calling it "one of the most horrific chapters in American history."
- Curatorial adviser Brent Stonefish of the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective invoked the "seven generations" philosophy; his daughter Emma is coordinating a Lenape/Lunáapeew Nations Pow Wow in Brooklyn's Prospect Park that resumed last year after a 53-year break.
- The exhibit challenges the apocryphal story that Dutch settler Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 in trinkets, noting that Lenape people did not believe land could be owned and that most scholars agree New York sits on stolen, unceded Lenape territory.
- Curator Angel "Monxo" López said he went into the project expecting resentment-driven content, but found "not a single moment that speaks about that... they found a way of dealing and engaging with those historical wounds in ways that are not ugly, nasty, or resent-driven."
Why it matters: The exhibit converts a 19th-century assimilation artifact — a hymnal used to strip Lenape children of their language — into a tool for reviving Munsee, and its refusal of grievance framing reframes the public narrative of New York's first inhabitants from "a people who were" to "a people who are." By pairing historic material with living cultural practice, the show pushes back against the assumption, reinforced by land acknowledgments outside institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that Lenape presence in New York ended centuries ago.
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