Lenoir Preserve and Native American Heritage Month
As Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and more importantly, November is “Native American Heritage Month”, I wanted to make this post today.
This will not be my main post about Lenoir Preserve but this is an important update for this page going forward.
Research about social media states that being authentic and showing your genuine personality are two ways to gain followers. Nowadays, though, bringing up things that could potentially trigger claims of “politics” or leaning one way or another can make an “influencer” lose a broader audience. (I hope I'm never considered an influencer...)
With that being said, being authentic is much more important to me than gaining a “broad audience” or getting the most followers possible. My authenticity lies in my passion for the intersection of accurate history, social justice, and the recognition of personal privilege. Being a white woman, from a relatively middle class background, is my form of privilege and having this platform, however big or small it may get, means I need to use it to lift up voices that are not as often heard.
November is “Native American Heritage Month” and I would like to make a pledge that was inspired by a favorite IG of mine, @thruhikers; that pledge being: I endeavor to research and recognize and uplift the plight of the tribes who’s ancestral homes we stole and colonized and pushed them out of on land where these parks that I post about reside on.
I decided to use Lenoir Preserve as the jumping off point for this pledge because they have done the bare minimum as a park to include some Native American history as it is related to the Preserve. They broadly explain that the land was originally occupied by the Lenni Lenape, which they defined as “true people” and that at some point in time they no longer lived there.
It was an attempt at acknowledgement, I suppose.
There are no remnants of the Lenni Lenape that one could casually find on a walk around Lenoir Preserve, which is a travesty and is the result of centuries of colonization by the Dutch and the English and later just urbanization of modern New Yorkers.
I’m going to do my best to at the very least on IG, give you the name of the people who’s ancestral home you’d be visiting, and here on tumblr, I will always do my absolute best “former history major research attempt” to give you more information if you’d like to educate yourself about the people who lived here for thousands of years before us and treated this land with such respect and reverence.
It feels impossible to me to be able to post about these wonderful parks, refuges, preserves, whatever, and then to just completely ignore that everywhere I post about is stolen land.
I have no interest in having followers who reject history regarding Native Americans or who think that they are somehow more entitled to the United States than people who are immigrating here now.
ALL AMERICANS are immigrants, except those who were here before the Europeans came.
I can EASILY trace my family coming here from Ireland in the 1700s and Germany in the 1800s. I come from a family of immigrants.
The Lenni Lenape people emigrated to North America when mastodons were still alive, so this is their land, and the least I can do is give them that recognition.
ESPECIALLY THE DAY BEFORE AMERICAN THANKSGIVING… with its bastardized version of history where the Indigenous populations and the colonizers had a wonderful dinner and meeting of the minds, instead of the truth of the Native Americans teaching the colonizers how to properly farm the new land and how to hunt and forage and not die in North America, only to be then met with accidental and purposeful murder through diseases and then just erasure through forced migration or assimilation.
I don’t have strong feelings about this at all OBVIOUSLY….
Recognizing the Native Americans who lived where I now live and visit is the least I can and will do, and if you don’t want to read about it on occasion, there are plenty of other places to get information about parks in New York State.
Please watch this space for a true post about Lenoir Preserve coming this weekend and thanks for reading this far if you did!
credit for the map of the "13 tribes" of Long Island goes to a young man named Jeremy Dennis, who is a member of the Shinnecock nation out on the East End of Long Island who is trying to preserve Native history on Long Island with his incredible website which you can see more about here!
credit for the list of translations goes to Westchester Magazine who did a really incredible breakdown of Native history in the Hudson Valley that you can read here!
