Tri-Co Philly: Art and Culture of Indigenous Philadelphia: From Shackamaxon to the Present

ARTH061/ENVS056 | Thursdays 12:15-3:00 p.m.

Christopher Green, Swarthmore College 

Near the entrance to Penn Treaty Park, a rusting sculpture made from perforated metal rises from a traffic island on Delaware Avenue. The silhouettes of two cut-out figures can be made out against the sky, standing hand-in-hand. The figures are based on the Penn Treaty wampum belt, a woven belt of white and purple quahog shells that commemorated the Treaty of Shackamaxon, named for the important Lenape site at the present-day park where William Penn and Chief Tamanend of the Lenape signed the founding agreement of Pennsylvania under the Treaty Elm. The figures represent the joining of Penn and Tamanend in a peace that would be infamously broken in subsequent years by Penn’s sons, resulting in the forced removal and deterritorialization of the Lenape and other nearby Indigenous communities. A plaque next to the sculpture, Moon Over Indian Land, made by Chiricahua Apache artist Bob Haozous, reads “This is Indian land.” Countering the pervasive myth of the vanishing race, Haozous’s inscription asserts an ongoing and active Indigenous presence, refuting the idea that Indigenous peoples have disappeared since early colonial contact and reminding passers-by that such history pervades the earthen foundations of the city’s landscape.

This course will take up this missive and examine the visual and material histories of Indigenous communities, artists, and leaders of present-day Philadelphia and its surrounding ancestral territories, from pre-contact to the present. We will consider the history of the city and the land upon which it stands as an Indigenous place, one that has been occupied since time immemorial by Indigenous peoples and that has served as a gathering place and cross-roads for the travelers, diplomats, and storytellers of many Native nations. We will consider how the Indigenous history of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania more broadly reflects on and is interrogable through present-day sites and constructions of civic identity, and how to this day a resurgent Indigenous community calls Philadelphia home. Among topics for close study are the archaeology and material culture of the Eastern Woodlands and ancestral Lenape territory, including earthworks, beadwork, and pottery; Euro-American representations of Indigenous peoples from early contact through the twentieth century, including history paintings such as Benjamin West's Penn's Treaty with the Indians and portraits of Indigenous leaders and diplomats passing through the city as part of delegations to the nation’s capital in Washington, DC; Indigenous oral histories of and visual representations of such histories, such as the Shackamaxon wampum belt; Philadelphia monuments and the memorialization of colonial history; and modern and contemporary Indigenous art and exhibitions that reflect Philadelphia as vibrant urban Indigenous center. We will visit Philadelphia-area museums, art collections, and public sites including the Penn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Barnes Foundation, Penn Treaty Park, Welcome Park, City Hall, and more in order to engage in close-looking and hands-on object and site analysis to better understand the ways that Indigenous history undergirds the foundation of the city and, more broadly, the nation. This course will be taught in Philadelphia as part of the Tri-Co Philly Program.

Eligible for ENVS, ESCH