In 2019, my adult child, River, and I visited our Lenape tribal homeland together for the first time. We are enrolled citizens of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and descendants of the Delaware Nation of Oklahoma, one of three Lenape bands in the United States. Our Lenape ancestors and people were forced from our Eastern Woodlands homelands over two centuries ago and pushed halfway across the continent to Oklahoma, where my father was born. Like many Lenape’ok (Lenape people), we’d never had the opportunity to lay eyes on the homeland that holds the spirits of our ancestors, and the plant and animal nations that nourished our Lenape family for countless millennia.
Our Indigenous homelands are a central part of our identities and cultures. Epigenetic research shows that our relationships with our homeland ecologies are literally part of our DNA, as is the trauma of our separation from them. Living disconnected from our homelands feels like someone carved an empty space where an integral part of my existence used to be. This has affected every aspect of my life, including my artistic and storytelling practice.
The following words and images are memories from four trips to visit Lënapehòkink, our homeland. Having finally reconnected that dangling thread to its source, I feel as if I can start weaving back together some of what has unraveled within my family. I was finally able to begin to understand what it means to be remembered by the land as a Lenape person. My memories of the land are now part of the land, like the memories of my ancestors before me.
Nem kitahikàn ènta ika a…
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