The city's first inhabitants get the room, and curate it themselves

New York museums have shown Lenape material for a century and a half. The difference this time is in the second half of the title.

The exhibition

Halumii Ktapihna: Lenape Legacies and Futures opens at the Museum of the City of New York on Friday 25 September 2026. It is organized with the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective and features more than 30 artists, alongside wampum belts, tools, textiles, documents and maps.

Why "and Futures" is the whole argument

The standard institutional treatment of Indigenous New York is archaeological. Objects, a date range, a displacement, and an implied ending sometime in the eighteenth century. It is a tense as much as a framing: everything is described in the past.

Thirty living artists in the same room as the wampum makes that impossible. You cannot walk through a show with contemporary work in it and leave with the impression that the subject concluded.

The collective, not the museum

Organized with a Lenape collective rather than about Lenape people is the structural change, and it is the one that determines everything else — what gets shown, what is not shown, and who decides which objects belong in a case at all.

That question is unavoidable here. A wampum belt is a record and an agreement; a museum displaying one is displaying a document whose other party is in the building.

The city underneath the city

Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx sit on Lenapehoking. Roughly half the borough names and a good number of the street grids' oldest lines follow paths that predate the grid entirely — which is the sort of fact that is repeated often and examined rarely.