Blog post #2
The placemaking process at commemoration sites is never fully completed, this is beneficial when specific sites like Independence Hall attract tourists from all around to hear about the founding of the United States. The interpretation presented by the National Parks Service on our tour was relatively nuanced- mentioning the signing and reading of “The Declaration of the Rights of Women of the United States” and the building’s use by Civil Rights activists during the 1960’s. Largely left out of the conversation, however, were Indigenous peoples of all nations. There was no acknowledgement that the building stood on Lenapehoking nor was there any mention of the displacement which created the settler city of Philadelphia. Yet if one looked closely at the ceilings of the main hallway, they would see the European-stylized depictions of Native American men in their war bonnets.
To relegate Native Americans to passing statements or nearly caricatured depictions embedded in architecture is unjust at best and upholds replacement narratives at worst. Thus, reinserting the stories of Native peoples is paramount in this space; history does not end with the meeting of white men in a courthouse airing their grievances with their mother country, but it does not begin there either. The story of Independence Hall could use a temporal shift- whether that be giving a synopsis of the history of Lenapehoking, acknowledging the continuance of the Lenni Lenape despite dispossession and removal, discussing the presence of Native American diplomats in this space during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, or noting the influences of Indigenous governance on the U.S. There are several avenues to place Native peoples into the forward-facing narrative of the National Parks Service at Independence Hall (a temporal shifting of the narrative is just one possible way to do so); embracing a change in the stories we tell to incorporate Native peoples and histories is key to capturing a more compressive reality of early American History even at sites of commemoration.
