Prospect Park Pow Wow Returns This Weekend

PARK SLOPE — Indigenous artists and food vendors return to Prospect Park this weekend to celebrate the Third United Lenape/Lunáapeew Nations Pow Wow.

The free event runs Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the LeFrak Center at Lakeside, 171 East Drive.

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The gathering brings Indigenous people from across North America back to Brooklyn, on land long connected to the Lenape/Lunáapeew people.

The Lenape lived, farmed, hunted and traded throughout the region before European settlement, including in areas now part of Brooklyn.

European settlers later took control of the land, displacing Lenape communities from their ancestral homelands.

The area that became Prospect Park changed hands and uses over generations, from Indigenous homeland to farmland and, during the American Revolution, a battlefield.

Today, Prospect Park covers much of the landscape where those earlier histories unfolded.

The Pow Wow will feature traditional dancing, drumming and music, along with Indigenous artwork, handmade crafts and food.

The Grand Entry begins at 11 a.m. Saturday, when Indigenous dignitaries, dancers and drummers in regalia will enter the gathering. Lenape leaders and elected officials will follow with remarks.

A Youth Spotlight will feature performers ages 6 to 17.

Two young adults, Emma Hannah K. Stonefish of the Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiit and Javid Ridgeway of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, are serving as Pow Wow coordinators with guidance from elders.

Before Prospect Park existed, the area included farmland and wooded land. During the American Revolution, it became part of the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, when British forces fought American troops across the region.

Brooklyn later set aside the land for a major public park.

Landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Prospect Park in the 1860s, and the park opened in 1867.

Prospect Park hosted intertribal Pow Wows from 1916 through 1972.

The events eventually stopped. More than four decades later, Lenape organizers began rebuilding the tradition.

The event is also part of Prospect Park Alliance's ReImagine Lefferts initiative, which is reshaping programming at Lefferts Historic House around the history and continuing presence of the Indigenous people of Lenapehoking, as well as the history of Africans enslaved by the Lefferts family.

Lefferts Historic House will feature Eelunaapéewi Ehaptoonáakanal: Voices of Lunáapeew/Lenape, an exhibition built around video interviews with Lenape knowledge-keepers and culture bearers.