Museum of the City of New York opens Lenape exhibition on living culture and homelands

The Museum of the City of New York opened Halumii Ktapihna: Lenape Legacies and Futures in New York on September 25, bringing contemporary Lenape art and community voices into a new exhibition about culture, language and homelands. Developed with Lenape/Lunáapeew advisers, the show presents a living community alongside historical objects and is scheduled to run through April 17, 2027.

The exhibition is one of the inaugural shows at the museum’s Puffin Foundation Center for New York City Activism, which also opened to the public on September 25. The museum describes the center as a permanent space devoted to New York’s history of civic engagement and social movements. Halumii Ktapihna places Lenape perspectives within that broader program while giving the exhibition its own focus on the community’s present and future.

What visitors will see in Halumii Ktapihna

According to the museum, the exhibition brings together work by more than 30 artists with objects, archival materials, videos and interactive listening stations. Its three sections are called The Lunáapeew Today, Homelands and Creating the Future. That structure makes present-day Lenape life the starting point for an account that also addresses ancestral territory and what community members want to carry forward.

NY1 reported seeing gallery videos in which women from Lenape communities speak about their lives and historic objects. One features Kristin Jacobs, a language instructor from the Delaware Nation in Ontario, holding a wampum belt and speaking in Lenape. The format lets a community member explain an object and use the language within the exhibition, rather than leaving visitors with the object alone.

Beside the hymnal is a bolo tie made in 2024 bearing the words ‘We matter,’ according to the Guardian. Stonefish told the newspaper that the two objects together contain ‘a whole history.’ Their pairing puts a historical record beside a contemporary declaration of presence, a relationship that runs through the exhibition’s treatment of continuity.

How Lenape advisers shaped the New York exhibition

The museum says it developed Halumii Ktapihna with the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective and Lenape/Lunáapeew community advisers. NY1 reported that community members from the United States and Canada worked with the museum. That partnership matters to the exhibition’s central claim: Lenape people are participants in telling this story, rather than figures confined to the city’s distant past.

Stonefish, whom NY1 identified as a co-founder of the collective, explained the title’s message to the broadcaster: ‘We wanted to show that we are still here.’ Museum curator Angel ‘Monxo’ López told NY1 that the show is about the present, engaging with the past chiefly through art and culture. Those are the participants’ descriptions of the project’s purpose, rather than evidence of any measured effect on visitors or language use.

Contemporary artworks extend that emphasis. The Guardian identified works by June Lee Van Dunk, Elizabeth Doxtater, Zoe Hundley, Myles Jackson Lynch and Keitha Keeshig-Tolbias Bizindam. It described Van Dunk’s work as setting a traditionally dressed Indigenous figure against a modern New York street scene, with the Empire State Building behind it. The museum identifies her untitled 2023 work as an image associated with the exhibition.

What the exhibition says about Lenape homelands

The museum describes Lenape/Lunáapeew people as the original people of the region now known as New York City and its surroundings. It says the exhibition addresses land stewardship, displacement and relationships with ancestral homelands. These are themes presented through art, testimony and museum interpretation; the exhibition opening does not itself settle a land claim or establish a new legal outcome.

The Guardian’s report also challenges the familiar story that Manhattan was sold to the Dutch for $24, saying there is no paper record of that purported transaction. In the exhibition, the homelands theme is less a claim about one disputed anecdote than a way to bring the region’s Indigenous history into view alongside Lenape lives today. The Guardian also described a 2019 protest banner by Ashton Pemapanik Dunkley that connects environmental concerns with violence against Indigenous women.

Visitors can see Halumii Ktapihna at the Museum of the City of New York through April 17, 2027, according to the museum’s exhibition page. The available accounts describe its contents and the people involved in making it; they do not establish how audiences have responded or whether the show has produced measurable gains in language revitalization. Its immediate development is the opening of a public exhibition in which Lenape artists and advisers present their own connections to New York, past and present.