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I’m writing this newsletter on Lenapehoking, the ancestral land of the Lenape people. And while that very fact is true every time I hit “draft” and “submit” on Substack, I’m including the acknowledgment today with a special, specific intent: to recognize the world-changing work of Nora Thompson Dean.

Nora — also known as “Touching Leaves Woman” or “Leaves-That-Touch-Each-Other-From-Time-to-Time Woman” — grew up in Oklahoma, but her heritage was that of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Native American people who had been forcibly removed from their Lenape home over many violent, tortured years. Before Nora was born in 1907, the U.S. government forcibly relocated her mother, father and entire extended family to “Indian Territory,” thousands of miles away from their ancestral home.

Nora dedicated her life to keeping the Lenape way — their languages, traditions, ceremonies and more — alive. The Lenape originally lived in the Northeastern United States and spoke multiple languages, including Unami and Munsee. In the 1920s and 1930s, Nora saw firsthand how so much of what she loved about her language and traditions was suppressed, stripped away or lost to time. So she trained as a nentpikes, or Lenape healer, and worked with anthropologists, historians and linguists who could help preserve the teachings passed down to her.

In the 1960s, she and her husband created a mail-order business, Touching Leaves Crafts, to share cassettes and recordings of Nora speaking Unami. You can still listen to her voice today at the Lenape Talking Dictionary website.

Nora knew the importance of archiving — as a child, she’d watched Lenape treasures die with the elders who held them. So she diligently catalogued and stored Lenape-created music compositions, textile designs and even plant clippings and seeds. Nora’s mother carried kernels of Lenape blue corn with her when her family was forced to move West, then entrusted those same seeds to Nora; in 1985, the year after Nora’s death, her husband Charles donated the seeds to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so that the corn could once again grow in Lenapehoking soil.

“Seeds are kind of like time machines in a way,” said one seed growing program manager who planted Nora’s seeds to Manhattan. “Embedded within the seed, is the past … but there’s also the future piece: what is it going to grow into? Will we be able to harvest seeds from it? Will we be able to save seeds and pass those on?”

If you’re in New York, you can visit the — literal! — harvest of Nora’s life’s work, growing in the Morgan Library & Museum Garden.

More on 🌿:

• Nora Thompson Dean: Lenape Teacher and Herbalist, The Morgan Library & Museum

• True Native New Yorkers can never reclaim their homeland, Smithsonian Magazine

• Nora T. Dean, Herbalist, 77; Of Delaware Indian Heritage, The New York Times

• The Lenape (Delaware) Homeland, The National Museum of the American Indian

• Nora Thompson Dean: Archives and Manuscripts, Bryn Mawr College

• About Our Project, The Lenape Talking Dictionary

• On Preserving the Lenape Language (and Trying to Get Face Time with an NYC Mayor), LitHub

• What would true diversity sound like?, MIT Technology Review

More from me:

• Damn — does a book have any business being this good? I’d heard wonderful things about Chemistry but guess I was late to the Weike Wang party. So happy to be here!

  

• A mystery subscriber upgraded their payment plan to “Founding Member” and added a very generous gift on top of that! If this was you, please reply — I’d love to send you a tiny token (belying my very-not-tiny gratitude). And if you want to know more about founding memberships and their benefits, all that info is on the AWTK welcome page.

• Last week, I spent a few learning-packed days in DC as a National Press Foundation fellow. If you’re curious about NPF and its fellowships, grants and other programming, I recommend applying — the team is phenomenal, the workshops are great and I came away with a notebook packed full of story ideas.