David Oestreicher, PhD :The Lenape: Lower New York's First Inhabitants

9th Annual DrumBeats Through Time Schedule:

11:30 – Membership Meeting (Members Only)

1pm - Doors Open and event is FREE to the Public! 

Highlight for this week's announcement: 
1:30pm: David Oestreicher, PhD :The Lenape: Lower New York's First Inhabitants - Dr. David M. Oestreicher is recognized as a leading authority on the Lenape (Delaware), our region's first inhabitants, having conducted linguistic and ethnographic research among the last tribal traditionalists for over 30 years. The late renowned elder and traditionalist Touching Leaves Woman (Nora Thompson Dean, 1907-1984) called him her "Key in the East," and she and other elders relied upon him to help preserve and disseminate knowledge of her people.

Oestreicher is curator of the award-winning traveling exhibition, In Search of the Lenape: The Delaware Indians, Past and Present, which critic William Zimmer in the New York Times described as "an extended reverie," capturing "the vitality and poignancy of the Lenape saga." Oestreicher's writings have appeared in leading scholarly journals and books, and he completed the final portion of the late Herbert C. Kraft's The Lenape-Delaware Indian Heritage: 10,000 B.C. - 2000 A.D. -- a tome subsequently hailed by scholars as the seminal work on the Lenape. Oestreicher's monograph, "The Munsee and Northern Unami Today" in The Archeology and Ethnohistory of the Lower Hudson Valley and Neighboring Regions (1991), marked the first ethnographic account of the Hudson River Lenape (now the Canadian Delaware) since the work of anthropologists M. R. Harrington (1908, 1913, 1921) and Frank G. Speck (1945). In 1995 Oestreicher attracted international attention when he provided the first conclusive evidence that the Walam Olum, long believed by many to be an authentic Lenape epic, is in fact a 19th-century hoax perpetrated by the well-known scholar and charlatan, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. Consequently, the Archaeological Society of New Jersey received the outstanding Award for Excellence (an annual award granted for the best piece of historical writing in New Jersey) from the League of Historical Societies of New Jersey for publishing Oestreicher's "Unmasking the Walam Olum: a 19th Century Hoax." Following the publication of Oestreicher's research, the Delaware tribe of northeastern Oklahoma officially withdrew its former endorsement of the alleged ancient epic.

2:30 pm Martha Sempowski, PhD - Changing Styles of Smoking Pipes Used By Seneca Iroquois A.D. 1550-1800 - This talk will consist of a slide-illustrated overview of smoking pipes from Seneca Iroquois village sites spanning a 250 year period from the mid-sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. It will focus on some of the most obvious changes in the motifs and styles represented in smoking pipes, as reflected in well-dated archaeological collections curated at the Rochester Museum & Science Center. **Members and the general public are invited to bring their collections of beads and pipes for display and review at this event!

3:30pm Seneca Buffalo Creek Dancers - The Seneca Buffalo Creek Dance Group began in 1988 and is well known for being very proficient in their traditional Iroquois Social Dances. Many of the dancers in this group have won dance competitions for their particular categories at Pow Wow's across the country