Details By Jenna Kunze January 26, 2022
NEW YORK CITY—Curator, artist, and educator Joe Baker (Delaware Tribe of Indians) says his new exhibit, “Lenapehoking” (Lenape Land), at the Brooklyn Public Library’s branch in the Greenpoint neighborhood, upends museum hierarchies, in part simply by existing.
“There’s never been an exhibition to recognize Lenape people here in New York City,” Baker, a cofounder of the Lenape Center in Manhattan, told Native News Online during a walk-through of the exhibit before it opened Jan. 20.
He said he had to knock on a lot of doors to get an exhibit up. “My goal in exhibiting this historic material is to present it—not only to the public, but to our own community—to bring this important work back into contemporary narratives,” he explained.
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The exhibit includes Baker’s own art: three handcrafted beaded bags, called bandolier bags, that are specifically worn by Lenape men on special occasions to identify individuals. It also displays two historic bags, one recently purchased by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and lent to the exhibition, and the other held by a private collector.
Because the bags are so prized by collectors, Baker said he never saw one in real life until he was completing a residency at the National Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan.
“The message is: the return,” Baker said of the exhibit. “The idea that this important element of Lenape men’s dress be revived and could be returned to our communities.”
Lenape people lived on homelands across the Northeast until they were pushed out to Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario by European settlers, beginning in the 17th century.
Also returned and exhibited on the back wall…