At a Lenape Powwow in Prospect Park, Dancers Speak of Revival

The drums carried across the LeFrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park, where Indigenous dancers, artists and musicians gathered to sing, drum and compete in dance contests at a Lenape powwow. The people who came to dance traveled from as far as South Dakota, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Manawan, Canada, as well as from southern New Jersey and the five boroughs. Curbed’s Look Book photographed attendees at the event and asked several of them about what they wore, what they danced and why they came.

The regalia told part of the story. Cory Ridgeway, a program specialist from Cedarville, New Jersey, pointed to the floral work on his own outfit, which he said usually signals that the wearer comes from a woodland area. Ribbon work runs down the front, which he described as very traditional for Lenape people. Alongside those older elements, he said, dancers also use contemporary fabrics and designs.

Mathyias Ellis, a twelfth-grader from Bridgeton, New Jersey, explained the character behind his outfit. He dances as a prairie chicken, a dance meant to resemble a rooster trying to catch the attention of the girls during mating season. “It’s all flashy moves,” he told Curbed.

The event drew many young people. Among those photographed were a second-grader and a kindergartner from Marty, South Dakota, fifth-graders from Bridgeton and Cedarville, New Jersey, a fourth-grader from Bowler, Wisconsin, and a ninth-grader from Marty. Several were wearing regalia and preparing to compete.

For some attendees, the day carried the weight of a long history. Kiara Tanta-Quidgeon, an Indigenous-health researcher from Boston, told Curbed that powwows are an active revitalization for Native communities. She noted that colonial government once legally prohibited their dances, and said that people are still gathering and dancing after hundreds of years of suppression is “a really beautiful thing.”

Janiyakuha Webster, a cultural keeper from Bowler, Wisconsin, described what that suppression looked like inside one family. For many years, she said, her relatives could not speak their language openly. Her great-grandparents would talk in the basement and would not let the children come down. Today, she said, there are many cycles people have to break because of generational trauma.

The gathering also had a distinctly local thread. George Stonefish, a consultant who lives in East New York, told Curbed he grew up on 82nd Street, around the corner from Joe Namath, and spent summers with his grandmother in Canada, where he learned about powwows and ceremonies. He said the back-and-forth taught him to be versatile, comfortable in very different rooms. Other New York residents photographed included Alyssa Mosley, a communications coordinator from Bushwick, and Sookunon Nushkeesuqot, a museum president from Southampton.

Taken together, the portraits sketch a day in which Prospect Park, one of Brooklyn’s most visited green spaces, became a meeting ground for Native families from across the continent. The competition and the music were part of it. So were the quieter conversations about language, regalia and what it means to keep dancing.