In New York City, centuries worth of Indigenous history is being uncovered through art, stories and community
The Lenape were violently displaced 400 years ago, but their presence remains across the city
In a square block of New York City's Chinatown is Collect Pond Park — home to a small reflecting pool and centuries of Indigenous history.
The park was once the site of a sprawling body of water that served as a gathering place for the Lenape. Manhattan, which comes from the Lenape word Manahatta for the place where we get the wood to make the bows, is their homeland.
"The area would be completely different from today," Alan Michelson, a Manhattan-based Mohawk artist and a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, told Unreserved. "So you might get, you know, a mixture of different kinds of fish and different kinds of animals."
"And then there was singing and drumming, and it was probably a really nice, sheltered place to feast on oysters."
New York City has one of the largest urban populations of Indigenous people in the United States, but that history has been largely hidden — and artists, researchers and community leaders are working to shed light on it.
Michelson is among them.
The Indigenous history at Collect Pond Park has long been covered by pavement. But in 1990, Michelson introduced his temporary installation, Earth's Eye, at the park, which traced the contours of the once vibrant and important pond.
"When we go down there, we're just basically walking on what used to be a pond. It's sort of a grave, you know?"
'It still is our homeland'
Walking through the city, alongside its concrete skyscrapers, Brent Michael Davids, a Munsee-Lenape and Mohican composer, says he feels a deep connection to New York's Lenape roots.
"I see it all as, you know, Lenapehoking. It never stopped being Lenapehoking."
Lenapehoking translates to "Lenape homeland," which encompasses all of present-day Manhattan and part of Long Island, and stretches into Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut.
The Lenape were violently displaced from the area over the course of 400 years. Today, the Lenape diaspora includes five federally recognized nations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario.
Davids was inspired by his colleagues at Lenape Center, an advocacy group based in Manhattan, to write Lenapehoking, a song about Lenape presence in New York City.
"We were thinking, you know, what would it be like for a Lenape person to come back to the city?" said Davids, who is a co-director of Lenape Center.
"Most people, I'm not even sure they're aware Lenape are still around."
Mohawk ironworkers help build NYC
Though colonization forced many Lenape out of Manhattan in the 1600s, there's a misconception that Indigenous people didn't exist in the city as it developed, says researcher Allan Downey.
"American popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries held that these spaces, like New York City and other urban environments, were antithetical to Indigenous existence and largely void of Indigenous presence," said Downey, a member of Nak'azdli Whut'en First Nation and an associate professor of history at McMaster University.
"But we know that's not true."
Indigenous people have had an indelible impact on the skyline of New York City, helping to build it into the metropolis it is today.
Mohawk ironworkers, for example, were instrumental in the construction of landmarks like the Empire State Building, United Nations headquarters and World Trade Centers.
"When we look at the New York City skyline, I think it could be a kind of a triggering device to recognize the contribution and presence of not only Indigenous peoples, but the ways in which they articulate their identities, their self-determination, their nationhood and their sovereignty," he said.
Part of that contemporary history of Indigenous presence includes Little Caughnawaga (the anglicization of Kahnawake), a community formed by the Mohawk ironworkers in the borough of Brooklyn throughout the 20th century.
As they gained work in New York City, they invited their friends and family to join them, Downey said.
"From the late 1920s into the 1950s, what we see is approximately 700 Indigenous, Kahnawake individuals specifically, end up moving into this community," he said.
They weren't only ironworkers. Indigenous women, who moved there on their own accord, were employed in factories, hospitals and on Wall Street.
A Presbyterian Church, where Sunday school was taught in Mohawk, and several taverns became hubs for the community, helping them find jobs and connect with their family by phone outside the city.
While gentrification largely pushed the community's blue collar workers out, Mohawk ironworkers continued shaping the city's skyline for decades to come.
"It's this incredible story about how nationhood kind of moved and became redefined in a new area, a new space," Downey said.
Indigenous advocacy
Near Times Square, the American Indian Community House (AICH) aims to be a hub for Indigenous people in the city today.
"It's an exciting time. You know, we're trying to be more visible in [the] United States in general, and to have a space in Midtown … it's helpful for us and our people to know that there's a place to go to, that they can be around the community."
Tarrant grew up at AICH, or H as she calls it. The organization was founded in 1969 and today serves over 70 tribes. Programming hosted by AICH teaches Native American history and culture — things Tarrant says weren't taught in school — and the events are open to all, not just Indigenous people.
"We do a lot of advocacy and awareness of Native Americans," she said, noting the large population of Indigenous people in New York City.
"So, you know, we are here, but it's hard to be seen when you're less than one per cent of people here."
They're also working with school districts in New York City to gather data about Indigenous students during enrolment. "That way we know who these Native students are," said Tarrant, who hopes to support them through AICH.
Ultimately, she hopes to bring a public kitchen and performance programs back to AICH, while also creating new programs to help young people develop technology skills.
"My hope for the community house … is to have a space that is centrally located, that is a drop-in centre basically, that people can just come by and use the space how they need it."
'We've managed to hang on'
In the decades since Earth's Eye at Collect Pond Park, Michelson's work has been exhibited in galleries like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art PS1.
Through his art, Michelson continues to uncover the city's Indigenous history.
"I really love New York as it is, but I can't help but think of it as it was," he said.
"An Indigenous presence has been attempted to be completely erased. But, you know, we've managed to hang on."
This story is part of a travel series from Unreserved called Unmapped. The series invites us to look for the Indigenous presence in some of the most iconic travel destinations around the world. Meet the people who are nurturing community and raising the visibility of Indigenous pasts, presents and futures.