As Philadelphia celebrates the country’s 250th birthday, it’s important to Lenape activist, artist, and storyteller Holly Wilson that Americans remember the Indigenous peoples to whom the lands of this nation once belonged to.
The Delaware Valley Lenape, Wilson points out, has persevered through centuries of broken treaties. Each one accompanied by violent landgrabs forcing her people further west.
Yet through it all, she said, the Lenape have maintained their culture. Today, her people are artists, writers, teachers, parents, and friends. Lenape people, she said, vow to remain present as America’s story continues to unfold.
“I believe in this idea of Native futurism,” said Wilson, whose lives in Mustang, Okla. Her family has lived in Oklahoma since the mid-1800s, but she traces her lineage all the way back to the 1600s to the Lenape who lived along the Delaware River and Schuylkill.
“Even with everything that’s happened to us, we have an existence, we have a future,” Wilson said. “As hard as they tried to wipe us out, they couldn’t.”
Wilson will be in Philadelphia Saturday paying homage to her ancestors at the Philadelphia Historic District’s firstival honoring the First Peoples at Penn Museum’s Native North America Gallery. Firstivals are a part of the city’s yearlong celebration of America’s 250th birthday, commemorating all things quintessentially American that boast Philadelphia roots.
In remembering the “First Peoples” the Historic District is recognizing the millions of souls who lost their homes and homelands to make room for the United States of America.
“The Native American experience in America didn’t end when colonists came to America,” said Megan C. Kassabaum, Penn Museum’s Weingarten Associate Curator for North America. Kassabaum was among the scholars who curated the permanent Native North America Gallery that opened last November in advance of America’s 250th.
“Nor did America begin when the colonists came here. Those are two very important concepts we want people who come here to grasp.”
The North America Gallery, Kassabaum said, focuses on Native Americans from four regions of the United States: The Northeast region is an ode to the Lenape. The Southeast centers the Cherokees, while the Southwest and Northwest areas of the exhibit feature the Lingit and Alutiiq tribes along with the Pacific Northwest Eskimos, respectively.
Each regional grouping features artifacts found in archaeological digs; like bows, spears, stones, pipes, and baskets discovered in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century. But there are also pieces made by modern Native American artists that speak to the continued evolution of the Indigenous American experience.
“We wanted to emphasize that the Native culture isn’t static,” Kassabaum said. “These modern day Indigenous people aren’t making historic items, they are making contemporary works using glass, crayons, and brass. It’s an important reminder they are making choices to speak about their destiny through their art.”
Wilson has several works on display in Penn’s North America Gallery.
Her large scale mixed media installation, Native Futurism is a 20-foot photorealistic painting that depicts two Indigenous children catching fireflies on an early summer evening. Showing children with the fireflies, Wilson said, represents magic, dreams and possibilities, giving the characters humanity.
Another sculpture, I’m More Than Fluff features a brass carving of an Indigenous girl surrounded by feathers.
“I put her in a specimen bell jar surrounding by beautiful flowers as a way of saying I am more than something for you to study,” Wilson said. “We [Indigenous people] are not frozen in this romanticized era from the late 1800s where we have feathers and beads for you to gawk at. We exist as whole people today.”
This week’s Firstival is Saturday, Oct. 10, from 11 a.m.-1 p.m., at Penn Museum, 3260 South Street.
Each week, The Inquirer is highlighting a “first” from the Philadelphia Historic District’s 52 Weeks of Firsts. A “52 Weeks of Firsts” podcast, produced by All That’s Good Productions, drops every Tuesday.