Category: Lenni Lenape

If you’re looking for the area’s best holiday light displays, we’ve got you covered. We asked members of the All Things Chester County FaceBook group to send their favorite houses, and scoured the ChristmasPrism app (available for free on IOS and Android) to compile a road trip list just for you!

Chadds Ford/Pocopson

North Pole at Chadds Ford, near the Mendenhall Inn, Kennett Pike
https://christmasprism.app.link/DjSZjEm3ZEb?uri_redirect_mode=1
Drive up and listen to the radio station 91.1 FM, or get out and walk through the walking path. Light hours 5:30 – 9pm

Lenape Lights, near Brandywine Ace Pet & Farm Lenape Rd/Lenape Farm Ln
https://christmasprism.app.link/343X3AUUVEb?uri_redirect_mode=1
An interactive light display choreographed to music. Tune in to 94.9FM for the music portion of the show. Display starts at 5:30pm

Blow Mold Wonderland, near the Westtown Amish Market, Heritage Dr
https://christmasprism.app.link/idwkggFgbFb?uri_redirect_mode=1
Plent of 1960s blow molds and classic lights.

Downtown WC

A Spooky Holiday Season, S Wayne St/College Ave
https://christmasprism.app.link/PtWOW58TTvb?uri_redirect_mode=1
Come enjoy the holiday decorations with festive skeletons. The holidays with a spooky twist!

West Chester Christmas Light Display, South Concord Rd
https://christmasprism.app.link/tliQsIdeaFb?uri_redirect_mode=1
https://www.westchesterchristmaslightdisplay.com/
Raising money for the Brandywine Valley SPCA, walk through display requires a $5 donation. Letter to Santa area where kids can write their letters to Santa and receive a response

Christmas Spectacular, Tyson Rd
https://christmasprism.app.link/9iHWynAr8Eb?uri_redirect_mode=1
Come by and see our light display. Lots of lights and blow ups. Movie projector of The Grinch (live action version) plays all night long. Huge event December 16th 5:30pm

Grizzizziz Holiday Spectacular, Old Westtown Rd
https://christmasprism.app.link/CujUF0Tw5Eb?uri_redirect_mode=1
Fun house with window animations, colorful lights and patterns and lots of inflatables. Come see Santa’s Workshop and an Inflatable Frank the Gargoyle. Tune into 107.9FM for audio.

East Goshen

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The introductory panel to the exhibition “Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories” — currently on view at the Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania — states something remarkably important to the region.

But it isn’t in the words. It is the image on which the text is written: an overhead view of the Abbott Marshlands at the estuary where the Crosswicks Creek meets the Delaware River.

Joe Baker’s ‘Three Sisters,’ a 1997 oil on canvas from The John and Susan Horseman Collection, courtesy of the Horseman Foundation.

The land — part of Trenton, Hamilton, and Bordentown — is the site of what had been one of the largest Eastern settlements of Native American — as well as documentation of human activity there for 13,000 years.

It is also roughly in the center of the land called Lenapehoking (Land of the Lenape).

They are the indigenous people whose territory included all of what is known today as New Jersey, New York Bay and Hudson Valley, the eastern section of Pennsylvania, and northern sections of Delaware.

They are also the people whose culture was disrupted and then suppressed to near the point of extinction by European colonization, starting in the early 1600s.

The exhibition’s reference to “Never Broken” argues that the culture has never disappeared and that the exhibition is a type of reaffirmation.

The “visualizing” reference signals that the reaffirming will be done through visual art.

And, indeed, viewers will encounter ancient Lenape designs, European and Colonial depictions of the Lenape people, and new works by contemporary Lenape artists — who combine both Lenape and European and American art traditions.

The curators of what is being touted as the first exhibition of its kind…

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Wall Street is more than just a crosstown street at the southern tip of Manhattan. The term itself has become synonymous with the entire American financial market. But its origins go back to the northern border wall of 17th century New Amsterdam. Built by enslaved people, the wall was meant to keep the English from invading the Dutch colony. But it also kept out the land’s first people, the Lenapehoking.

Of course, to the colonizers, the land was theirs, purchased from the tribe in 1626 by the Dutch West India Company. The land was traded for (in today’s exchange) about $1,000 worth of goods, including tools, guns, cloths, and wampum, the shell beads used as currency in fur trading between Native Americans and early settlers. Peter Minuit brokered the deal.

In Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play Manahatta, now running at The Public Theater through December 23, the playwright draws a direct line from that first trade of land ownership on Wall Street to the housing market collapse in 2008. Nagle deftly weaves past and present to tell the story of the 17th-century Lenape-Dutch trade and a modern Lenape family in Oklahoma, whose home is under threat of bank repossession. It’s also a tale of two siblings: of one sister who stayed in Oklahoma and works to keep the Lenape language alive and the other sister who left to work for a financial firm on Wall Street.

Rainbow Dickerson, Sheila Tousey, Jeffrey King, David Kelly, and Joe Tapper in Manahatta Joan Marcus

Nagle is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and originally from Oklahoma (where most tribes were forcibly relocated during the Indian Removals). She now makes her home in Washington, D.C. and, like many playwrights, Nagle has a day job. She’s a lawyer, specializing in…

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Throughout Native American Heritage Month, the University, in collaboration with The Heard Museum’s Native Artists Resource Group, displayed prints crafted by Native American veterans along the walls of the ArtSpace West gallery on the West Valley Campus from Nov. 8 to Nov. 22.

The concept was brought to life with two three-day workshops taught by Jacob Meders, an associate professor of interdisciplinary arts and performance. The workshop showed veterans the process of making, carving and block printing — a traditional Indigenous art form. Later, their work was displayed in the ArtSpace West gallery.

Block printing is “carving into blocks and then picking them up and printing them to the press,” according to Meders.

“It’s not about what you get out of it for yourself, it’s about what do you do for others,” Meders said. “It’s more meaningful.”

The Native Veterans Print Exhibition was created by Marcus Monenerkit, the director of community management at the Heard Museum.

“The Native veterans have been healing through the arts for generations,” Monenerkit said. “As you know, the past warriors would come home and take part in ceremonies, and that ceremony is art.”

For this project, Monenerkit wanted to provide a safe space to “create and to be free and to be with other veterans.” 

Today is Native American Heritage Day, a time to celebrate the cultures and history of indigenous peoples in the Southwest. Discover their traditions and history year-round at the Heard Museum. Plan your visit and experience the diversity of indigenous cultures. pic.twitter.com/U7IArv5Fiw

— Heard Museum (@HeardMuseum) November 24, 2023

The printing workshop was not only about the art itself but also the effect it can have on others. 

“Instead, it is focused on the purpose of art. Art is a purposeful…

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ALLENTOWN, Pa. — A new 25-year lease will help the Museum of Indian Culture bring Allentown’s indigenous history to life, according to its executive director.

City Council members this month unanimously approved a new quarter-century lease — at $1 a year — for the museum in the Little Lehigh Parkway.

Pat Rivera, who’s served as the museum’s executive director for two decades, said her organization is “thrilled with” the new lease, as it can move forward with plans to “expand beyond our four walls (to) where the Lenape story actually happened.”

The museum recently received just over $1.5 million to build a Lenape village on three-quarters of an acre.

“We’re going to be able to take the landscape and the history and meld it all together.”

Pat Rivera, Museum of Indian Culture executive director

That land will include seven “educational pods” featuring demonstrations of indigenous “lifeways,” like fishing, cooking and making nets, Rivera said.

The demonstrations will show “how life existed primarily in the 17th century, the very start of when the European settlers got here and started with trade,” she said.

Courtesy

/

Pat Rivera, Museum of Indian Culture

A concept plan for the Lenape Village established in April 2021.

“We’re going to be able to take the landscape and the history and meld it all together,” Rivera said. Once the upgrades are complete, “we’ll be able to reflect that history for generations to come. So we’re really excited to be able to share the Lenape story.”

The village is scheduled to open in the fall of 2025.

The money will also fund a new welcome center at the museum, an extension of the Lenape Trail and an audio tour, she said.

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NYC Parks are celebrating Native American Heritage month with free events throughout the city – Learn more about the Lenape of Staten Island on Sunday November 26th. Via the Official Website of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation

During Native American Heritage Month, explore the past and present experience of Native Americans. Learn about the Lenape, as we connect the cultural significance of various flora and fauna in the park to the heritage of native people.

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A screenshot of LenaGPT, an AI powered language platform designed to translate indigenous Lenape languages.

A Penn student has co-created LenaGPT, an AI-powered platform designed to translate indigenous Lenape languages. 

Engineering first-year Ashmit Dewan, along with West-Windsor Plainsboro High School North senior Shiva Tripurana, created the translator. Most existing translation websites, such as Google Translate, do not offer English to Lenape translations. Tripurana and Dewan sought to address this gap by developing a translation model for the languages. 

“I started to realize that you could use computational linguistics to preserve language, information, and culture of the Lenape. And that’s kind of when we streamlined into LenaGPT,” Tripurana said.

LenaGPT allows users to pose questions and receive comprehensive answers, drawing on expertise and collaboration with the Lenape community. The platform facilitates learning and communication by providing translations of Lenape phrases and words.

“It’s really important that people understand that a language is a tremendous part of culture,” Tripurana added.

Tripurana and Dewan began developing the program approximately six months ago, meeting at least twice weekly to brainstorm and create a model akin to ChatGPT that offers both translation services and historical information. 

Unlike most translation models that rely on coded algorithms scanning a set of words, LenaGPT employs a large, sophisticated language model, necessitating extensive information coding. 

Tripurana is also the founder of LenaLingua, a non-profit created in 2020 that promotes the preservation and understanding of Lenape language and culture through computational linguistics. 

According to Tripurana, LenaLingua can be “a catalyst for people who don’t know anything about Indigenous cultures to kind of start learning about indigenous cultures.”

The site contains up-to-date information…

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