Paterson Great Falls National Park in what is now New Jersey is on the homelands of the Acquackanonk tribe of Lenape (Delaware) people. The Lenape called the area Totowa, meaning to be forced under water, or sometimes just Sokpehellak or Sookpehelleu, meaning waterfall. When the Dutch settled in the area beginning in 1624, they brought with them drastic economic and environmental changes. The Lenape has tense relations with the Dutch to say the least including the infamous “Slaughter of the Innocents” at nearby Pavonia where 120 Lenape people were massacred. After a series of retroactive purchases, legalizing earlier Dutch and Anglo settlement on Lenape land, the tribe eventually singed the Treaty of Easton in 1758 forcing the remaining Lenape to move to Ohio - this history is long and complicated and beyond the scope of an Instagram post. Today the Lenape consist of three federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma and Wisconsin.

Paterson Great Falls National Park, along with most histories of the falls I could find, covered the entire history of the Lenape in the area in a single sentence which ended with the settlement of the Dutch. I don’t want to say the history they do cover about Immigration and the Industrial Revolution is unimportant, but all of it rests on unacknowledged injustices, a story that should change how we view all subsequent events. This type of history is extremely common in the parks and gives the impression that Native people passively disappeared at the appearance of Europeans rather than the fact that people like the Lenape are contemporary political nations still surviving even after 250 years in exile from their homelands. Make sure to learn all the history.