RIGC called our table activity FALL FOR THE ART OF NATURE and invited folks to reconnect with our home and our kin on this earth by working with watercolor stencils for butterflies, birds, bees, flowers, and more.
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon as families stopped by the Meditation Steps lawn. Murals and artists were all around us and the river shown in the background. We highlighted our future as connected to our earth and all those creatures who share this life on our planet. A responsible relationship with the future can also include acknowledging our past and all those who were here on this land before us. So we posted the following statement at our table.
We acknowledge those who were removed from this land, their homeland. This wonderful place we know of as Roosevelt Island was originally part of Lenapehoking, the Lenape name for Lenape land, which spans from Western Connecticut to Eastern Pennsylvania, and the Hudson Valley to Delaware, with Manhattan at its center. In the 1800s the US government forcibly removed most Lenape remaining in the east, sending them further west and far away from their homeland. Today the Lenape peoples now reside in many places and their diaspora includes five federally recognized nations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.
As we learn more about and from Indigenous peoples and Indigenous science and ways of being, we can reconnect with our living earth home and our kinfolk, both human and non-human living beings.