Paterson hosts Native American festival, focused on Great Falls

Mitsu Yasukawa/ Staff Photographer

Kodi Tarrant, 6, of Shinnecock, N.Y., waiting his turn Sunday as other dancers of Silver Cloud present their traditional dance at The Paterson Museum. The Sand Hill Band of the Lenape and Cherokee Indians, The Paterson Museum, and the National Park Service presented a festival of culture of the indigenous community of Paterson.

PATERSON — Long before Alexander Hamilton identified the Great Falls as the site of the country’s first planned industrial city, and textile mills harnessing the water power multiplied, thrived, withered and crumbled, the Leni-Lenape Indians fished and hunted in the once densely wooded area.

It was a religious site where the power of the cascading water recalled their creator. “We used this region for one reason — because of the falls, same reason that Paterson was established,” said Sam Beeler, elder of the Sand Hill Delaware Indian tribe of New Jersey and a native of Paterson — Acquackanonk, as it was known to the Lenape. On Sunday, Beeler and other Leni-Lenape Indians showed more than 100 non-Indians their music, dances, food and artifacts at the Great Falls National Historic Park and the Paterson Museum.

It was the first Native American Indian Heritage Festival, which aims to showcase the diversity of Paterson during Native American Heritage Month, said Cyre Rodriguez, the event coordinator. There was also a simpler goal: “When you talk about our people, you won’t talk about us in past tense,” Beeler told attendees. “You’ll talk about us as current people.”

The Lenape, also known as Delaware Indians, have inhabited the area they call Lenapehoking — encompassing New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and Connecticut — for more than 20,000 years, Beeler said. There are 3,348 American Indians in Passaic County, according to the 2010 census. Most of them are Lenape or Cherokee, Beeler said.

In a morning ceremony at a park overlooking the falls, Ilyse Goldman, park ranger for the Great Falls park, honored the area’s “longest residents,” a burning sage cleared the area of negative energy and a flag reading “Seal of the Delaware Tribe, Lenni Lenape” was raised. Then the crowd danced with the Native Americans, some of whom were dressed in traditional handmade clothes, as tobacco sprinkled on a drum as a tribute to Mother Earth bounced off.

“It’s nice to see the actual people telling us about their culture,” city resident Barbara Flaum, 74, said afterward. She attended with her husband, Carl, 70. Around noon, the festival attendees walked to the Paterson Museum, where they watched a fancy dance performance by a Native American group and ate a meal of corn bread with bison and venison soups. They also toured the recently opened Lenape exhibition, featuring tools for hunting and horticulture — wooden hoes, rakes, axes, snare traps and spears — and a wigwam, a dome-shaped hut made of bark.

“How do you tell the story about New Jersey or any story without Chapter 1?” said Giacomo DeStefano, the museum director. “Chapter 1 is the indigenous people.” A museum panel explains the Lenape meaning of North Jersey towns’ names: Hackensack (place of stony ground), Ho-Ho-Kus (the red cedar), Paramus (where there is fertile land) and Tappan (cold water or dawn breaking).

As he watched the fancy dancing, Jan B. Thomas, a 60-year-old lifelong city resident, said he was moved by how the Native Americans “respected the land.” He said he sometimes came to the Great Falls alone at night. “I sit and listen to the water, meditate,” he said. Thomas said he had witnessed upheaval in the area, at least since he worked in the textile mills in the 1970s and “every year, we were hearing a factory closed up.” “One thing that didn’t change: the falls,” he said. “And that will never change.”

They’re so idiotic.

No real indians that were originally in NJ ever dressed with those bright colors.

Bunch of freeloaders looking to cash in.

Long ago long ago the indians who were originally in NJ intermarried and blended into the rest of American society, in NJ and elsewhere.

Indians who originally were from elsewhere in the US but migrated to NJ in the 1800’s are not indigenous to NJ; there are some in this category.

One little problem, the Wisconsin Glacier, it covered this area and was up to 3 MILES thick, it began to reseed about 10,000 years ago and took about 5,000 years to do so, resulting in Long Island and NJ South of the Raritan.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.