Hear Joe Baker of the Lenape Center introduce Nora Thompson Dean and discuss the significance of this exhibition.

Joe Baker: Nora Thompson Dean’s work was foundational for the Lenape Center, an organization that has a simple, but difficult, mission, given centuries of expulsion and erasure: continuing Lenapehoking, the homeland. I, like Nora, was raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and am a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. Our Tribal community was a close-knit community bound by our families known as the main body of Delawares. I learned from Nora stories of our ancestral land, Lenapehoking. She was always interested in sharing her traditional knowledge and art forms, such as beadwork and ribbonwork. Nora fashioned with a delicate hand beautiful dance clothes for our community members. Her manner was quiet and reserved while at the same time leading the effort to document our Lenape language.

As you learn about Nora in this exhibition and in this space today, we ask that you consider what it means to live in or visit Lenapehoking. This vast territory was home for the Lenape for thousands of years before contact. An uninterrupted expanse of verdant forests and waterways, an interdependent, interconnected web, where no single element or being was of its own place and embodied spirit.

Joe Baker recalls Nora’s many visits to Lenapehoking.

Joe Baker: Though Nora spent her life in Oklahoma, she made a number of trips to the East Coast, starting in the 1970s. She spoke at universities and schools, visited sites important to the Lenape, and participated in ceremonies and gatherings to raise awareness of Lenape history throughout the tri-state area. These trips east from Oklahoma by automobile, traveling thousands of miles, were challenging both physically and emotionally. Nora knew that recognizing and remaking these connections to the homeland were necessary to healing.

Nora’s visits to Lenapehoking were usually greeted with enthusiasm and a willingness to learn, though occasionally she encountered indifference and even resistance. Her persistence, her dedication to being present, inspires the Lenape Center in its mission today.

Joe Baker discusses how Nora’s example continues to inspire new works.

Joe Baker: Nora’s work has been the seed for many ideas and projects over the years. One of them is the Lenape Talking Dictionary, a website on which you can hear her voice and the voices of other Lenape speakers, and an important resource for the study of the language today. A recent tribute is the composer Brent Michael Davids’s composition, “Touching Leaves Woman”. As co-director of Lenape Center, Davids created the concert opera, “Purchase of Manhattan,” debunking the myth of the Manhattan purchase so engrained in the American psyche. In this case is the hand inked score by the composer, musically celebrating Nora Thompson Dean.

Hear Joe Baker describe the connection between the corn plants you see before you and Nora Thompson Dean.

Joe Baker: These corn plants were grown from seeds preserved by Nora’s mother Sarah Wilson Thompson. They were passed down to Nora and, after her death, her husband Charley Dean donated seeds to a number of institutions and seed collectors. Farm Hub, an agricultural organization with whom the Lenape Center has been partnering, grew their first crop of corn from these very seeds in 2021. The Lenape corn you see growing before you now, from small plant to full-grown stalk with beautiful ears of glistening dark-blue kernels, is a testament to the work that the women of Nora’s family did to safeguard and nurture traditional Lenape culture. The seed cycles of planting and harvesting are accompanied by songs and dances appropriate for the time of year. In the Spring the seeds are sung awake as they are prepared for planting and in the Fall through harvest dances are put away for Winter’s sleep. The Bean Dance Song and Dance, well known to Nora, was brought to Lenapehoking for the 2022 harvest for the first time in hundreds of years.

Joe Baker provides context about the beans growing in the Morgan Garden.

Joe Baker: The bean plants here also have a connection to a Lenape woman: they are named for Hannah Freeman, a Lenape woman who lived in the Brandywine Valley west of Philadelphia in the eighteenth century. Freeman and many of her family members stayed on their ancestral lands, and she grew and preserved this traditional bean. A basketweaver and farmer, she continued traditional practices until her death in 1802. She lived in the area that was known as the William Penn landing site. Dispatched by the British, Penn was to claim what is now Pennsylvania as a British Colony in 1682. This set in motion a series of forced removals of Lenape people, most notably the Walking Purchase in 1737. The Walking Purchase was consigned under protest by my 6th great grandfather, Chief Nutimus.