The Distinctive Wappingers: Getting to Know “The Men of the East” Through Ceremonial Art

Details:

In this multi-media presentation, Professor Evan Pritchard will discuss the various ceremonial pieces of Wappingers (from Waben, “men of the east” or “dawnland people”) and discuss what they can teach us about the Wappingers’ uniquely inclusive Eastern Woodland culture. He will share what he has learned about the history of this distinctive population in his thirty-five years of study and interaction with earth-loving  Wappingers descendants in and around the Hudson Valley. Combining colonial records, linguistics, archaeology, and oral tradition, he will attempt to reconstruct the remarkable history behind these few surviving art pieces, a story which embraces three ancestral regions spread out over hundreds of square miles of what was once lush green forest land. The Wappingers story is not like any you have ever heard, and yet it is the key to the true understanding  of the so-called “melting pot” story of New York and hence America itself.

This lecture is hosted in-person at Boscobel.

Evan Pritchard, a descendant of a number of Algonquian-speaking peoples, has been conducting field interviews with Algonquin elders since 1990 and has written well over fifty books on Native American culture and history and is the director of A Center for Algonquin Culture, which he founded in 1998, in Ottawa. He has been a lecturer at Vassar College, Pace and Marist Universities, UMass, Columbia University, University of Ontario, London, John Jay College, and many more. He has curated exhibits at LOEB gallery at Vassar, the Prattsville Museum in Prattsville, New York, and an historical map exhibit at Clarkson University’s Beacon facility, to name a few.  Some of his critically acclaimed books include Native New Yorkers, (Chicago Review Press) No Word For Time, (Millichap Books) Bird Medicine, (Inner Traditions) Henry Hudson and the Algonquins of New York (Chicago Review Press) Native American Stories of the Sacred (Skylight Paths), plus several Algonquin language texts and multi-lingual poetry books. He lives in the Hudson Valley.