We are located on the island of Mannahatta within Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Munsee Lenape (MUN-see Leh-NAH-pay). This place has long been a gathering place for Indigenous people to trade and maintain kinship ties before they were displaced as a result of European settler colonialism (through a violent process that includes genocide, forced removal, and continued displacement.) The Lenape are a diasporic people that continues to live here in close connection with their land.

This is is a living acknowledgement that recognizes that New York City has one of the largest urban Native American and Indigenous populations in the United States.

This First Nations community includes five federally recognized tribes (The Delaware Nation, The Delaware Tribe of Indians, Stockbridge–Munsee Community, Munsee-Delaware Nation, and Moravian of the Thames First Nation) and several state recognized Delaware Bay tribes in New Jersey and Delaware (The Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation of New Jersey, the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, the Nanticoke Indian Tribe of Delaware, and the Ramapo Munsee Lenape Network of New Jersey.)

For more than five hundred years, Native communities across the Americas have demonstrated resilience and resistance in the face of violent efforts to separate them from their land, culture, and each other. They remain at the forefront of movements to protect Mother Earth and the life it sustains. Today, corporate greed and federal policy push agendas to extract wealth from the earth, degrading sacred land in blatant disregard of treaty rights. Acknowledgment is a critical public intervention, a necessary step toward honoring Native communities and enacting the much larger project of decolonization and reconciliation. Join us in adopting, calling for, and spreading this practice.  ~U.S. Dept of Arts & Culture

See USDAC’s Call and Guide to Land Acknowledgment, #HonorNativeLand, and also read their sunsetting statement and retrospective.

To learn more about the Lenape people and their culture, please check out Pratt’s helpful portal.

To see the geographical territories that make up this country’s indigenous homelands, visit Native-Lands.ca.

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Please let us know if there are corrections or improvements that we can make to this statement: hello@primeproduce.coop