These are some of the ideas that NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute is exploring in a yearlong effort to engage with the culture and history of the Lenape, the Indigenous people who lived in present-day New York City prior to colonization. Through virtual reality window art, installations reimagining territory, academic gatherings, walking tours, and more, the Village is playing host—perhaps for the first time ever—to a series of unconventional and sometimes painful conversations about its original inhabitants.

When Europeans arrived in the Americas, the Lenape homeland—known as Lenapehoking—encompassed the upper and lower Delaware and Hudson river valleys and included all of present-day New Jersey, New York State’s Rockland, Orange, Westchester, Putnam, and Nassau counties, and the five boroughs of present-day New York City. “Manhattan” derives from the Lenape word Manaháhtaan. “There were at least 10,000 years of history prior to 1609,” A/P/A artist-in-residence Beatrice Glow explains, “But there’s been so much displacement and dispersal—even people being trafficked—over the past 500 years that so much has been erased. Given that this was a first site of the shock of colonization, and that this city has been rebuilt over and over again, there’s a lot that we don’t know.”

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t—and shouldn’t—be trying to discover more, even if that means confronting loss and uncertainty. On October 29, A/P/A with the NYU Native Studies Forum and the Lenape Center will host the first-ever Manaháhtaan Symposium, featuring Jim Rementer, director of the Lenape Language Project, among other scholars and Indigenous community leaders from around North America. And since March, Glow has been working with A/P/A director Jack Tchen on The Wayfinding Project, an evolving multimedia installation that—inspired in part by the worldwide voyage of the Hōkūleʻa—explores Lenape knowledge of the environment and questions how Indigenous cultures have been portrayed in colonial histories.

Take maps, for example. “They’re a part of how we come to understand the world,” Glow says. “But so many that are a part of our foundational education are really based off of only one perspective.” For the installation, she painted on mylar to add additional layers—additional perspectives—to three Dutch and English colonial maps, tracing the old Lenapehoking borders onto a map of the New Amsterdam colony, reimagining the Western hemisphere amid melting glaciers, and redrawing a color-coded map of British holdings so that the Pacific—not Europe—is at the center. Breaking out of the colonial worldview, she says, is a matter of looking at such documents and asking: “What do we remember? What do we forget? What do we want to carry forward?”

