It’s a little-known corner of Manhattan that stretches to the very northwest tip of the New York island. This January morning, the bare trees and the gray sky do not do justice to the beauty of Inwood Hill when, in the summer, green dominates. With its marked relief, the 79-hectare park is home to the last natural forest in Manhattan, and the oldest. Remaining relatively intact, the site is one of the rare living pieces of a New York that has now disappeared, buried under the asphalt and skyscrapers. It is dear to the heart of Joe Baker, a descendant of the Lenape, the indigenous people who inhabited the region before European colonization in the 17th century.e century. “This is our ancestral land, he explains. It contains the spirits of our ancestors, our stories, like the entire island of Manhattan. »
As various historical associations prepare this year to commemorate the 400 years of the settlement of the first Dutch settlers in what would become New Amsterdam and then New York, Joe Baker is one of those who are striving to make the voices of the his. With the Lenape Center, a non-profit organization that he co-founded in 2009 and which he directs alongside Curtis Zunigha, Brent Michael Davids and Hadrien Coumans, he fights to affirm the place of the Lenape in a story told primarily from a European point of view, bring their culture back to their ancestral land and offer new perspectives to their own people.
In this Upper East Side cafe where he has arranged to meet, the 77-year-old man with graying hair speaks in a low voice. He uses the surnames of his ancestors, including a long line of Lenape leaders, a people also called Delaware. His ancestor, Chief White Eyes, was among those who negotiated the Treaty of Fort Pittin 1778, the first peace text signed by the young United States with an indigenous nation. “There is direct descent in my family that goes back to the very beginning of contact with Europeans, says this artist who moved to Manhattan in 2020. It is thanks to her that I have the privilege and the honor to do the work that I do. Because what our ancestors had to face is not unlike what we face today, namely a continuous and constant erasure of our presence in Manhattan. »
“A Eurocentric worldview”
Who knows that the island, cradle of Dutch and British colonialism before independence from the United States in 1776, takes its name from the lenape Manahatta ? That the famous Broadway Avenue, then called Wickquasgeck, was one of the main trails of the Lenape? That Pearl Street was so named because of the piles of oyster shells left behind by the Lenape? And for Joe Baker and his family, Wall Street, named after a wall built to protect the very young Dutch colony, is one of the last vestiges of the violence that their ancestors had to face?
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