Week 5

Individual Project

Title

Offering to Ancestors Grove (Working title)

Concept

Historical Art installation of Lenapehoking past and present that intentionally acknowledges the lives of people that are written in history and contributed to the founding of Philadelphia and to the freedom of a New America. This installation will interpret and translate the native presence during influential and course changing times in Early American history in a city that has had so much to gain from it.

Background

The Lenape were the original people of the land we now call Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, these ancestral ground have been a part of their blood memory for millennia until the 1683 Treaty with William Penn at Shackamaxon under the Elm tree where Lenape and Quaker vowed to live among each other and exchanged gifts for land. The city we call Philadelphia, the most historic city in the country, for its location on the northeastern seaboard of North America

Justification

Native representation in the United States is lacking, and even more so if you are not a part of the culture. In the city of brotherly love and high touristic place on the coast has almost no representation if you don’t know where to look for it or simply unaware of native presence. There are at most 3 public commemorations to Native American presence in Philadelphia, one of which visually shows a Lenni-Lenape man who appears to be Chief Tamanend, who signed the 1683 treaty with William Penn. The other statues are references to Native American presence like the statue in Fairmount park which shows a Native man kneeling on a rock with adorned with a war bonnet which is not a part of Lenape traditional Regalia, and then the Swann Memorial Fountain in Logan Square which is said to represent the three rivers.

Location

Front and Market Street, Philadelphia Pennsylvania.

I chose this location because although the Tamanend Statue is much more visible than William Penn on top of City Hall, it still has a level of superiority of the European and docile of the Indigenous. With this realization I choose to create a spot of intentional indigenous thought and presence in front of the Tamanend Statue, where the bus stop was.

Interpretation (1 way)

Initial idea of interpretation was to construct living installation that can be utilized by the public as a spot of reflection based on the city plans to change Market St into a walkable center from its proposed fly bridge over the Delaware river and I-95 Highway.

Conclusion

The impact of having an intentional space that honors Lenape presence in Philadelphia past, present and future will have lasting effects on this historical city of Pennsylvania. In field observation there is little representation, knowledge and regard for the Lenape of Pennsylvania and if it is mention it is a textbook history sweep of Lenape history and presentive during the time of early America and early united states. In having this space of remembrance and honor the reconnection to a highly developed setting which has not shied away from admitting that it builds over historic sites brings the narrative back into the hands of the original caretakers of the flood plains of the Delaware river and its tributaries.

Drawing (emerging)