The Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective (EL Collective), American Indian Community House and Prospect Park Alliance held a United Lenape/Lunáapeew Nations Pow Wow at the LeFrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park on Saturday and Sunday, a weekend filled with Lenape and allied Indigenous artists and creators, dancers, drummers, and artisan craft and food makers.
The weekend event was the first pow wow in Prospect Park since 1972, and the second ever Lenape pow wow in the city.
The pow wow, with support from the city Department of Cultural Affairs and ally sponsorship from Middle Church, serves as an educational message to the broader community, and a social and cultural message for the Lenape people, George Stonefish, founder of EL Collective, said in a statement on Sept. 9. The EL Collective is an organization that brings together Lenape/Lunáapeew communities who have been displaced across Turtle Island (North America).
"We want all to leave the Pow Wow with a deeper understanding about why we as contemporary Native Americans still follow our culture, practice our dances and share our songs today," Stonefish said.
The event is part of the Alliance's ReImagine Lefferts initiative, an initiative to re-envision the mission and programming of the park's historic house museum to focus on exploring the lives, resistance and resilience of the Indigenous people of Lenapehoking, whose unceded ancestral lands the park and house rests upon, and the Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family.
