Lenape Nation Featured in Penn GSE Film

October 13, 2011 - As Chief Red Hawk explains the Lenape story, The Prophecy of the Fourth Crow, “The First Crow was the Lenape before the coming of the Europeans. The Second Crow symbolized the death and destruction of our culture. The Third Crow was our people going underground and hiding. The Fourth Crow was the Lenape becoming caretakers again and working with everybody to restore this land.”

That story forms the centerpiece of a video, produced by Amit Das and Kristin Searle, that will be on display at Fulfilling a Prophecy: The Past and Present of the Lenape in Pennsylvania. Titled The Prophecy, the film introduces visitors as they enter the exhibition’s welcoming chamber.

Das is director of GSE Films, housed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. Searle is a dual-degree doctoral student at Penn GSE and Penn’s Anthropology program.

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The exhibition, originally displayed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, opens on October 16 as a permanent installation at the Lenape Nation Cultural Center in Easton, Pennsylvania.

The exhibition itself tells the story of Pennsylvania’s Lenape people, most of whom were forcibly removed from their homeland in 1700s. In recent years, the descendents of those who remained have come forward to tell the story of their survival in Pennsylvania.

Curated by Chief Robert Red Hawk Ruth and Shelley DePaul, both of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, and by University of Pennsylvania anthropology student Abigail Seldin, the exhibition relates the history of the state’s secret Lenape in their own words. The exhibition draws on oral histories documented by Chief Red Hawk, DePaul, and other members of the Lenape Nation as part of their ongoing Family History Project and on anthropological research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania.

The Lenape Nation Cultural Center is located on the second floor of the Bachmann Publik House on 2nd and Northampton Streets, Easton, PA.


Contact: Kat Stein, Exec. Director of Communications / katstein@gse.upenn.edu / (215) 898-9642