Brooklyn Nature Days Living Land Acknowledgement
A Living Land Acknowledgement is a statement that recognizes the Indigenous Peoples who have been dispossessed from the homelands and territories upon which an institution was built and currently occupies and operates in.
We seek to create a safe space for children, supporting them in their play as they grow lifelong connections to Nature, to the Land, and to all Living Things. It is our mission to create a truly immersive nature experience in the middle of Brooklyn, NY, for all children and families who wish to join us in the park. We aim to empower children through our daily practices; by modeling our language, actions, and energy around the concepts of empathy, community, and consent, together we build lifelong skills that teach us to care for nature, ourselves, and each other. From earthworms to mushrooms to hawks to fellow humans, we are all connected.
Brooklyn Nature Days classes, and Prospect Park itself, is on the land of the Munsee Lenape people. The proper name of New York City is the Munsee word, Lenapehoking, which means “Land of the Lenape.” The Land where we play, give care, and explore is stolen Lenape land.
We celebrate this place called Lenapehoking and honor the Indigenous People who first loved it and cared for it. We honor the current Lenape Tribes and Leaders who are still here, still connected to the Land, who are still and have always been here stewarding the Land.
As an organization, we have participated in extensive Living Land Acknowledgement training and discussion with local Lenape leaders through the Lenape Center. They have advised us on financial reparations, land reparations, and how to be good stewards of the land where we now reside. Further financial reparations are built into the tuition families pay for our programming.
This acknowledgement is an evolving, living, changing acknowledgement of the Land and its Native Keepers. We will revisit this acknowledgement in order to reflect upon our practices and hold ourselves accountable. We will learn from our mistakes and vow to grow from them. We strive to be anti-colonialist in all we do and teach. Colonialism is the antithesis of consent. We strive to amplify agency and consent to our budding naturalists as we explore the land where consent was neither asked for nor given when White Europeans stole Munsee Lenape land through generations of genocide.
Current Lenape tribal leaders have retroactively welcomed us to this Land and we respond to this gracious and peaceful act by saying: We are grateful for your care of the Land and your commitment to sharing its gifts and lessons. We accept your invitation to share, never own, your native land and we promise to honor it with our hands, our hearts, and our minds. We promise to honor this Land and its original caretakers in all we do.
For more information, please visit and/or donate to the following organizations:
https://usdac.us/nativeland/ The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is a people-powered department—a grassroots action network inciting creativity and social imagination to shape a culture of empathy, equity, and belonging.
https://native-land.ca/ Native Land Digital, a Canadian non-profit, is committed to land awareness and acknowledgement via their comprehensive and interactive map of Indigenous tribes, dialects, and treaties
https://thelenapecenter.com/ Our local Lenape Tribal Leaders run this organization devoted to the education and amplification of Lenape culture and history [Lenape Center Instagram]
https://herbancura.com/ This organization aims to guide an open-source, radical movement towards societal regeneration. We have taken classes through Herban Cura as a staff and fully recommend and appreciate their expertly run knowledge shares