These acquainted with the Picnic Home in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park would possibly acknowledge it as a well-liked venue for weddings and different personal celebratory occasions. However this previous weekend, December 7 and eight, the sound of rhythmic drumming, conventional chants, and ringing bells might be heard pulsing via the historic constructing’s brick partitions throughout the adjoining Lengthy Meadow, marking the inaugural Eenda-Lunaapeewahkiing Indigenous Tradition Truthful.
The free occasion gathered Native American group members from throughout Turtle Island (the title for the land mass now often called North and Central America) and native Brooklyn residents in a site-situated celebration of Lenape historical past, tradition, and artisanship. Organized between the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing (Land of the Lunaapeew) Collective, which is at the moment made up of 5 Lenape communities spanning Ontario, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; the New York Metropolis-based nonprofit American Indian Neighborhood Home; and the Prospect Park Alliance, the honest introduced academic performances, hands-on craftmaking, and Native-made items again to the Lenapehoking, the place the Lenape have been forcibly displaced by European colonizers in the course of the seventeenth century.
“We’re spread all around and that’s part of the problem,” Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective founder George Stonefish, who’s of Lenape and Ottawa descent, informed Hyperallergic.
On Saturday afternoon, a number of Pink Blanket Singers members briefly took their chanting and drumming exterior.
A part of the ReImagine Lefferts initiative addressing Prospect Park’s historical past of land dispossession and enslavement, the honest can also be an extension of Stonefish’s personal longtime work. In 2018, he organized the primary Lenape Powwow on Manhattan Island on the Park Avenue Armory, and he hopes to do one other in Prospect Park. New York Metropolis Parks Division officers didn’t allow the multi-day occasion this yr, so in mid-August,Stonefish proposed the cultural honest as a substitute.
Embroidered and beaded Indigenous-made artisan items have been on the market all through the weekend-long market occasion.
“This [event] is a real departure for the Prospect Park Alliance and the Picnic House as a venue … but the leadership of the Alliance and the Parks Department really wanted to support this as a welcoming gesture, and hopefully we can do something like this again,” Dylan Yeats, venture supervisor for the ReImagine Lefferts initiative, informed Hyperallergic.
All through the weekend, Brooklyn residents have been handled to performances by the Pink Blanket Singers, a Southern-style Native American drum and dance group made up of Nanticoke, Lenape, Haliwa-Saponi, and Mohawk tribal members, who carried out conventional dances originating from communities throughout the continent. At a desk in one other nook, kids realized the way to make dolls out of dried corn husks and wire whereas their mother and father shopped for handmade vacation presents crafted from uncooked cover, grapevines, deer bone, wampum, turquoise, and different pure parts.
The Picnic Home in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park remodeled into an Indigenous artisan craft market this weekend.
Most of the artisans who had congregated on the Picnic Home have longstanding relations and have been glad for the chance to meet up with previous family and friends, who they’ll typically see once they collect at powwows, the place they usually promote their items.
“We’ve known George Stonefish our whole lives, we’ve known Red Blanket, so it’s nice to get together because we see people that we know,” Rozlynn Tone-Pah-Hote, a Kiowa-Maya-Oneida up to date beadworker, informed Hyperallergic. She and her husband had introduced handmade jewellery, lacrosse heads, and beaded vacation ornaments to the market, which she stated had gone higher for them in gross sales compared to this yr’s Thunderbird American Indian Powwow in Queens.
She thinks that is due to the honest’s lack of vendor charges and its free entry to the general public, not like the powwow, which is a ticketed occasion that may rack up bills for sellers. Along with the purposeful omission of sales space charges, distributors got resort room lodging and parking areas.
“We were taken care of very well, which is not very common anymore,” Tone-Pah-Hote stated.
Deer pores and skin clothes and moccasins on the market by Schenandoah Deerskin Designs, who have been additionally promoting handmade jewellery
Partly funded via the ReImagine Lefferts Initiative, which obtained funding from the Speaker’s Initiative of New York Metropolis Council Speaker Adrienne E. Adams, the occasion was additionally supported by the Manna-hatta Fund via the American Indian Neighborhood Home and the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective.
Brent Stonefish, one other founding father of the collective who traveled from Ontario, informed Hyperallergic that he hopes extra Lenape group members from Canada will return for future occasions. He stated he has visited New York Metropolis 5 occasions since September and each journey he “envisions more people” coming too to reconnect to the land.
“It’s nice to come home,” he stated.
One of many Pink Blanket Singers performs a standard hoop dance on Saturday.
Art work by Randy Silva, a Pueblo and Navajo painter
Beadworker Rozlynn Tone-Pah-Hote meticulously strings collectively beads for a brand new set of earrings on the honest. 
Corn husk dolls with hair comprised of horse mane and clothes comprised of cloth items have been bought on the market. 
Emily, who went into the honest along with her pal Franklin Zhang, purchased a pair of earrings from one of many distributors after seeing indicators within the park. 
Youngsters and their mother and father realized the way to make corn husk dolls at a workshop desk on the honest.
Pink Blanket Singers carry out a rhythmic jingle dance, which originated among the many Chippewa in the course of the early twentieth century.
A vendor carves silver butterfly earrings on the honest
The outside of the Picnic Home in Prospect Park, positioned alongside the Lengthy Meadow on the West facet of the park
