LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We acknowledge the Indigenous Lenape people (also called Lenni-Lenape or Delaware) as the original inhabitants of the region now occupied by the University of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia. Indigenous people have lived here for at least 10,000 years; their ancestral lands, historically known as Lenapehoking, encompass parts of present-day eastern Pennsylvania, northern New Jersey and southern New York state. These lands are still marked with Lenape names today, including: Passyunk (from Packsegonk, meaning “in the valley”); Wissahickon (from Wisameckhan, meaning “catfish stream”); Kingsessing (from Chingsessing, meaning “place of the meadow”); and Manayunk (meaning “place where we go to drink,” the original name for the Schuylkill River), among many others.

During the late 1600s into the 1700s, the pressures of colonial settler land thefts and hostilities forced most of the Lenape people to leave their homelands and move westward. Today, Lenape tribal nations include the Delaware Tribe of Indians and Delaware Nation (in present-day Oklahoma); the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape, Ramapough Lenape, and Powhatan Renape (in present-day New Jersey); the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans (in present-day Wisconsin); and the Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiit (Delaware Nation at Moraviantown) and Munsee Delaware (in present-day Ontario, Canada).

homelands. We also acknowledge and condemn the forced removal and continued exploitation of African Americans in West Philadelphia. Cognizant of calls for truth and reconciliation, we must take responsibility for reckoning with erasures of Native presence, removals of Native heritage, desecrations of Native graves, distortions of Native histories, and other forms of violence against Native Americans, African Americans, and people of color. We thus call upon the University of Pennsylvania and the Department of Anthropology to collaborate with present-day Lenape nations to engage in the crucial work of recovery, and to recognize the continued presence and sovereignty of hundreds of other Indigenous Native American and First Nations communities today.

As you walk these lands, we hope that, by recognizing this Indigenous history, you will be inspired to engage in initiatives that foster decolonization, repatriation, and reformation, here and elsewhere.