Theatre company unveils interactive art installation to honor Lenape tribe
Curio Theatre Company marked Indigenous Peoples' Day by unveiling an empty wooden flower bed outside its building on Baltimore Avenue.
By Madeleine Wright
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PHILADELPHIA (KYW) — A new art installation in West Philadelphia is paying tribute to the first inhabitants of our region.
Curio Theatre Company marked Indigenous Peoples’ Day by unveiling an empty wooden flower bed outside its building on Baltimore Avenue.
There’s a sign asking the community to fill up the flower bed with Lenape soil to acknowledge the land the tribe lived on.
Paul Kuhn, artistic director for Curio Theatre Company, said he built the art installation after his ancestors bought land in Nova Scotia, Canada that was originally owned by indigenous people.
“We got 200 acres for $2,000,” Kuhn said. “And $2,000 probably went to the evisceration of a complete… founders and originators of that soil.”
Kuhn said while pouring the soil doesn’t heal the trauma, he wants to do what he can to right the wrong. If the flower bed is filled by spring, he wants to use it to grow indigenous plants, which played an important role in the Lenape tribe as a source of food and medicine.
More than a dozen employees took turns using a coffee cup to pour soil into the flower bed.
“It’s wonderful people are taking time out to acknowledge people in the homeland,” Barbara Bluejay Michalski, Chief of Culture for the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, said.
Tim Martin is a director for the Curio Theatre Company. As a member of the Yurok tribe in Northern California, he said he appreciates the gesture.
“I was very touched by the people that gathered here today,” Martin said.
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