In this panel discussion commemorating the 2022 Lenapehoking exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library, the Lenape Center’s Curtis Zunigha and Joe Baker, and Indigenous historian Heather Bruegl discuss forced migrations of the Lenape people from their northeastern homeland.
Lenapehoking is the Lenape name for the Lenape homeland, which spans from Western Connecticut to Eastern Pennsylvania, and the Hudson Valley to Delaware, with Manhattan at its center. During the panel, hear Baker on his family’s experience of forced migration to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Bruegl on the Stockbridge-Munsee forced migration to Wisconsin, and Zunigha will describe the pre-settler colonialism map of Lenapehoking, tracing the scattering of the Nation to present day locations including 3 communities in the U.S. and 2 communities in Canada.
Joe Baker is an artist, educator, curator and activist who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past thirty years. He is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and co-founder executive director of Lenape Center in Manhattan. Baker is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work in New York and was recently Visiting Professor of Museum Studies at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado. He serves as a board member for The Endangered Language Fund, Yale University and on the Advisory Committee for the National Public Art Consortium, New York and cultural advisor for the new CBS Series, “Ghosts.”
Baker has guided in his capacity as executive director for Lenape Center partnerships with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (his work is currently on exhibit there), Brooklyn Museum of Art, American Ballet Theater, Moulin Rouge on Broadway, The Whitney Museum of Art, and others. He served as a consultant for BKSK Architects for the renovation of the international award winning Tammany Hall in New York and is cultural consultant for Inwood Sacred Sites for the…
