10/12/2026
Celebrate Indigenous People's Day today! Here are some amazing events happening in the city today.
On Indigenous Peoples' Day, we're gratefully acknowledging the Lenape who stewarded the land that is now Hunters Point for thousands of years and celebrating the diverse and vibrant Native communities who continue to use our waterfront parks today.
The ancestors of the Lenape arrived 3,000 years ago and established communities throughout what is now NYC. They stewarded the wetlands that were developed into our parks, fishing and gathering oysters, using native grasses for building materials, and collecting native plants still found in the parks like lambsquarters, pitch pine, and beach plums for food, construction, and medicinal purposes.
Dutch and later English colonizers steadily drove the Lenape and other groups from Queens and the rest of NYC, so by the mid-1600s almost all Lenape had been forced from their lands, starting a series of displacements that resulted in most modern Lenape living on reservations in Kansas, Wisconsin, and Ontario.
