The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) announced on Wednesday it has installed a plaque in memory of the Lenape Native Americans, who once occupied most of what makes up the current US states of New York and New Jersey. Attached to the facade of the museum on the Fifth Avenue side, the bronze plaque pays homage to the region's first inhabitants and their descendants.
"The Metropolitan Museum of Art is located in Lenapehoking, home of the Lenape diaspora, and a historic gathering and trading place for many indigenous peoples who continue to live and work on this island
," recalls the memorial plaque inscription .
We respectfully recognize and honor all indigenous communities - past, present and future - for their ongoing and fundamental relationship with the region ”.
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According to the Met, this approach is part of the work of memory in which the American institution has invested, like what has been happening for several years already in Canada or Australia. This recognition of the first occupants of the region and of the tumultuous history of the settlers with the indigenous peoples who preceded them also follows the installation of a commemorative panel at the entrance of the Charles and Valerie Diker collection of native american art. Inaugurated in 2018, the collection is the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Native American art since the creation of the American Department of the museum in 1924. Since 2018, the museum claims to have collaborated with several consultants in order to better take into account thethe geographic and historical heritage of the land on which the Met is based.
The plaque put up this week on an exterior wall of the Met.
Bruce Schwarz / Metropolitan Museum of Art
The installation of the plaque comes a year after the first appointment of a curator in charge of the museum's Amerindian art collections, in the person of Patricia Marroquin Norby, and when an exhibition devoted to portraits of 'Native Americans by Swiss painter Karl Bodmer (1809–1893).
"This recognition is an important part of the Met's commitment to building and maintaining respectful relationships with Indigenous communities,"
Museum President Daniel Weiss, who oversaw a recent expansion of this new collection, said in a statement. Native American art.
The Amerindian occupation of Manhattan has, among other things, given its name to the peninsula, in the Lenape language. The whole of this territory was acquired by Dutch merchants in the 1620s, in a transaction whose authenticity is debated, and at the same time when New Amsterdam was founded, renamed New York by the England in 1664. Lenapehoking, the Lenape territory, was gradually incorporated into the nascent British Colonies during the 17th century. The Lenapes were the subject of several forcible displacements until the middle of the 19th century, which led them for the most part to Canada and Oklahoma.