Logline Our project (Untitled) will showcase an object-centered conversation about the Lenape people by both Lenape members and seminal voices in the discourse around Lenape history, indigeneity, and the future of Lenape civilization.

Issue & Background The questions we have at hand revolve around historical memory that the Lenape Center in in the NYC metropoliton/Kingston area are addressing through their art, curation, rematriation, and conversation to explore the relevance of the Lenape peoples’ work towards the present-day and beyond. Our story would be happening in Hadrien’s mother’s apartment in Manhattan, an ornate apartment full of artifacts, where we would stage a conversation with Joe Baker, Lenape Center co-director, Dyami and Kay, leaders of the seed rematriation project, Professor Benoît Challand, a professor at The New School for Social Research, and Patricia Marroquin Norby, the first Indigenous full-time curator at the Met. Using beads, seeds, and objects that members bring to the table, we would allow a conversation to unfold and address issues that are important to the subjects. We predict they would center around survivance, forced removal, genocide, decentering anthropocenic thinking, and possibilities as the Lenape Center faces their first fully Lenape-centered exhibition in the country, but are leaving it up to them to dictate the film’s text.

Treatment The film will be generated from a conversation between multiple participants with different but complementary perspectives around issues of Lenape sovereignty. Once the participants, selected by Joe, meet in a historic New York apartment, we will allow conversation to unfold spontaneously in a spirit of exchange and open dialogue. Key thematic objects will be present -- Joe’s beadwork, a 19th-century bandolier bag, rematriated seeds -- perhaps arranged to provide generative thematic reference points, but we will allow topics to emerge naturally, relinquishing authorial control of the text of the film. As the conversation unfolds, the film can leave the physical space of the apartment to visit multiple other sites, stories, and themes, always returning to the central conversation. This circular, circulating structure models reciprocity and sharing, like that of the harvest dinner the held by the Lenape Center upstate, and what Joe calls the generosity of seeds and beads, small objects which nonetheless may feed a family or encapsulate a history. Likely interwoven stories would include the seed rematriation project, forced removal of the Lenape from their land, current representation and participation in New York

institutions, and the future of the Lenape in this region. Possible materials will include close photography of the central objects, the meaningful landscapes of the city, and related archival materials. Around the central conversation, these elements will shift, echo, and recombine freely.