Munsee

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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