Conner Prairie making plans for new Lenape exhibit

For 25 years, Conner Prairie visitors have learned the history of the Lenape people, a tribe of Native Americans who lived in Indiana before being forced to move farther west.

Now, the living-history museum in Fishers is making plans for a larger exhibit that is expected to open in 2029 and better tell the story of the people also known as the Delaware.

The project called Lenape Connection & Kinship on the White River will feature an outdoor exhibit space that replaces the current 1816 Lenape Indian Camp, which opened in 2000. The new exhibit will be funded in large part by a $2.5 million grant Conner Prairie received this month from Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative. Although Conner Prairie already planned to complete the project, the Lilly Endowment grant will speed up its completion by years.

“The space is tired and in need of a refresh, and we’ve been developing strong relationships with members of the Lenape community and the Delaware tribe for a while and have been working on ways to better tell their story,” Conner Prairie Chief Programs Officer Ryan Spencer said.

The Lenape exhibit is one of a flurry of new projects at Conner Prairie.

Promised Land as Proving Ground, an exhibit that addresses nearly 1,000 years of Black history, opened last year. A $33 million welcome center called the Museum Experience Center is expected to open in 2026. And planning is underway for the Conservation Campus on the museum’s property on the west side of the White River in Carmel, where visitors will learn about food, farming and the environment.

The goal of the Lenape project will be to help the tribe share its history more widely and outside its communities, Spencer said. The new exhibit is especially important, he added, following the 2023 retirement of Mike Pace, who was the only Lenape employee at Conner Prairie and educated visitors for nearly 30 years.

Some planning for the exhibit has already begun. Along with the outdoor exhibit, a gallery inside the Museum Experience Center will focus on the history of the Lenape people and their connections to the William Conner family and the land along the White River.

“History is incredibly important because, without a good understanding, it’s difficult to understand where we’re going,” Spencer said.

He explained the exhibit will give the full story of the Lenape, including their way of life, food, language, how they used the land and William Conner’s familial connections to the tribe.

“It’s impossible for us to tell the story of the land and the people without talking about the people who were here before Western settlement,” Spencer said. “And we want to make sure that we’re doing that in a way that allows the Lenape to tell their own story, rather than people telling it for them, so we want to make sure we do it right.”

The Lenape tribe originally lived along the Hudson River Valley in what is now Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They were forced to move west following the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 when the tribe ceded territory to the United States.

In current-day Indiana, they settled along the White River in about a dozen towns from Muncie to Indianapolis, said David Nichols, a history professor at Indiana University in Bloomington.

“They were people, who at least for the preceding 100 years, have been willing to be mobile. That’s not to say they were nomads, but they were willing to move in search of better economic opportunities or to get away from people who were trying to kill them,” Nichols said. “When they moved, they usually tried to settle in places that were like those they had previously lived in, so they preferred to be near rivers.”

When Indiana became a state in 1816, nearly two-thirds of the land belonged to American Indians who had received the territory through a series of treaties. But in 1818, the Lenape gave up their claims to land in Indiana following the signing of the Treaty of St. Mary’s and were moved to west of the Mississippi River, in present-day Missouri.

Eventually, the Lenape were removed to Oklahoma, where they remain.

“We want to tell the story of the people who were here before, how they used the land, how they viewed the land,” Spencer said. “We want to tell the story about Indigenous people who were from farther east but were displaced with colonization and moved out here before they were forced into Oklahoma.”

Funding help

While Spencer said Conner Prairie will continue to seek additional funding, the $2.5 million Lilly Endowment grant will provide the bulk of the money needed for the Lenape Connection & Kinship on the White River project.

“Without this $2.5 million, we would not be able to do this project in this short time frame,” he said. “It would have been possible [to do the project], but it would have taken a lot longer to get there.”

The Lilly Endowment grant will help Conner Prairie repurpose two existing historic cabins at the current 1816 Lenape Indian Camp exhibit; hire a community curator; conduct site visits to Lenape communities; host Lenape representatives at Conner Prairie; refine curriculum for school groups to better connect with the present and future through the lens of food, faith, family and fellowship; and establish a new framework for storytelling and curation for future Conner Prairie exhibits.

Conner Prairie CEO Norman Burns said the grant will help the museum deepen its partnerships with Indigenous communities and tell their stories.

“We are committed to creating a space where the Lenape and other Indigenous peoples can share their histories and traditions, fostering understanding and connection for all,” Burns said in written remarks.

Lilly Endowment launched the Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative in 2019 with an expressed goal to “fairly and accurately portray the role of religion in the U.S and around the world.” Past grant recipients include The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, Angel Mounds State Historic Site in Evansville, Lilly Library on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus and the University of Southern Indiana, for efforts to preserve the utopian legacy of New Harmony.

Conner Prairie’s Promised Land as Proving Ground took shape in December 2020, when Lilly Endowment’s initiative awarded a three-year grant of $500,000.

This month, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art also received a $2.5 million grant from Lilly Endowment initiative. The Indianapolis museum plans to use part of the funding to create an exhibition based on Native American tattoo practices and styles.

Lilly Endowment Vice President for Religion Christopher L. Coble said people trust museums and other cultural institutions and visit them to learn about their communities and the world.

“We are excited to support these organizations as they continue to develop their capacities to help visitors understand and appreciate the diverse religious beliefs, practices and perspectives of their neighbors and others in communities around the globe,” Coble said in written remarks.

Continuing to grow

The 1,046-acre Conner Prairie, which averages more than 400,000 visitors each year, opened in the 1930s as Conner Prairie Farms, after Eli Lilly—grandson of Col. Eli Lilly, the founder of Eli Lilly and Co.—bought the property and restored the William Conner house.

Over the next decade, Lilly moved several historic structures to the site, and the land was a working farm for years. He transferred the property to a charitable trust in 1963 and named Earlham College as trustee. Conner Prairie Pioneer Village (later renamed Prairietown)—which features the loom house, trading post and other structures Lilly had moved onto the property—opened in 1974.

In 2005, Conner Prairie split from Earlham after a prolonged legal fight. In the 20 years since gaining its independence, Conner Prairie has grown from primarily the site of the 1836 Prairietown attraction and 1816 Lenape Indian Camp to encompass multiple outdoor and indoor experiences, including 1859 Balloon Voyage and 1863 Civil War Journey.

“I’ve said that Conner Prairie is a wonderful place that is still trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up,” Spencer said. “We’re constantly trying to figure out how to tell the story of all of us in a better way, using all the different unique tools that we’ve got.”

The museum’s most ambitious recent project—Promised Land as Proving Ground—fully opened last year when construction was completed on the exhibit’s three buildings.

The Museum Experience Center will feature immersive exhibit spaces, access to collection items and hands-on learning and play when it opens next year.

Conner Prairie is also planning two sections in its Conservation Campus expansion west of the White River in Carmel on 260 acres of land the museum has left largely untouched.

The Food, Farm & Energy Experience District will include a 70-room eco-lodge and cabins, multiple buildings and exhibits, a restaurant, a historic farm and a modern farm, a solar field, trails, woodlands, prairie, wetlands, a pedestrian bridge and parking. Visitors to the Food, Farm & Energy Experience District will need a ticket.

The Land, Water & Energy Innovation District will be south of the Food, Farm & Energy section. It will feature the White River Education & Ecology Center, an innovation center with 55,000 square feet of office space, a farm-to-table restaurant, commercial buildings and a trail.

Spencer said Conner Prairie’s growth is about telling a wide variety of stories and helping people grasp history.

“Everybody has a place here,” he said. “And we want to make sure that people whose stories maybe have been underrepresented, we want to make sure that their stories are being told, that everybody can see their history.”•