Those familiar with the Picnic House in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park might recognize it as a popular venue for weddings and other private celebratory events. But this past weekend, December 7 and 8, the sound of rhythmic drumming, traditional chants, and ringing bells could be heard pulsing through the historic building’s brick walls across the adjacent Long Meadow, marking the inaugural Eenda-Lunaapeewahkiing Indigenous Culture Fair.
The free event gathered Native American community members from across Turtle Island (the name for the land mass now known as North and Central America) and local Brooklyn residents in a site-situated celebration of Lenape history, culture, and artisanship. Organized between the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing (Land of the Lunaapeew) Collective, which is currently made up of five Lenape communities spanning Ontario, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; the New York City-based nonprofit American Indian Community House; and the Prospect Park Alliance, the fair brought educational performances, hands-on craftmaking, and Native-made goods back to the Lenapehoking, where the Lenape were forcibly displaced by European colonizers during the 17th century.
“We’re spread all around and that’s part of the problem,” Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective founder George Stonefish, who is of Lenape and Ottawa descent, told Hyperallergic.
Part of the ReImagine Lefferts initiative addressing Prospect Park’s history of land dispossession and enslavement, the fair is also an extension of Stonefish’s own longtime work. In 2018, he organized the first Lenape Powwow on Manhattan Island at the Park Avenue Armory, and he hopes to do another in Prospect Park. New York City Parks Department officials didn’t permit the multi-day event this year, so in mid-August,Stonefish proposed the cultural fair instead.
“This [event] is a real departure for the Prospect Park Alliance and the Picnic House as a venue … but the leadership of the Alliance and the Parks Department really wanted to support this as a welcoming gesture, and hopefully we can do something like this again,” Dylan Yeats, project manager for the ReImagine Lefferts initiative, told Hyperallergic.
Throughout the weekend, Brooklyn residents were treated to performances by the Red Blanket Singers, a Southern-style Native American drum and dance group made up of Nanticoke, Lenape, Haliwa-Saponi, and Mohawk tribal members, who carried out traditional dances originating from communities across the continent. At a table in another corner, children learned how to make dolls out of dried corn husks and twine while their parents shopped for handmade holiday gifts crafted from raw hide, grapevines, deer bone, wampum, turquoise, and other natural elements.
Many of the artisans who had congregated at the Picnic House have longstanding relations and were glad for the opportunity to catch up with old friends and family, who they will often see when they gather at powwows, where they typically sell their goods.
“We’ve known George Stonefish our whole lives, we’ve known Red Blanket, so it’s nice to get together because we see people that we know,” Rozlynn Tone-Pah-Hote, a Kiowa-Maya-Oneida contemporary beadworker, told Hyperallergic. She and her husband had brought handmade jewelry, lacrosse heads, and beaded holiday ornaments to the market, which she said had gone better for them in sales in comparison to this year’s Thunderbird American Indian Powwow in Queens.
She thinks this is because of the fair’s lack of vendor fees and its free access to the public, unlike the powwow, which is a ticketed event that can rack up expenses for sellers. In addition to the purposeful omission of booth fees, vendors were given hotel room accommodations and parking spaces.
“We were taken care of very well, which is not very common anymore,” Tone-Pah-Hote said.
Partly funded through the ReImagine Lefferts Initiative, which received funding from the Speaker’s Initiative of New York City Council Speaker Adrienne E. Adams, the event was also supported by the Manna-hatta Fund through the American Indian Community House and the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective.
Brent Stonefish, another founder of the collective who traveled from Ontario, told Hyperallergic that he hopes more Lenape community members from Canada will return for future events. He said he has visited New York City five times since September and every trip he “envisions more people” coming too to reconnect to the land.
“It’s nice to come home,” he said.
