Lunch & Learn: On the Turtle's Back

Join the NYC Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) each month for our virtual Lunch & Learn Series—an intimate conversation with agency staff and special guests focusing on the collections of the Municipal Archives and Library and the history of New York City. During 2025, the 400th anniversary of the founding of City government, DORIS is expanding access to records documenting the city and its diverse communities.

On November 12th, join Dr. Camilla Townsend, the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, for an in-depth discussion of the prize-winning book On the Turtle’s Back: Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren she co-authored with Nicky Kay Michael, PhD.

The Lenape tribe, also known as the Delaware Nation, inhabited the region now comprising eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and parts of New York, Connecticut, and Maryland for centuries. However, America’s independence from the British displaced the tribe west to Indiana, then Missouri, and finally the territory that became Oklahoma. The Lenape could not carry much from their ancestral homeland, but they ensured their stories were preserved and passed down through generations.

On the Turtle’s Back is the first collection of Lenape folklore. Originally compiled by anthropologist M. R. Harrington over a century ago but never published until now, the book features stories told to Harrington by a Lenape couple as well as more recent interviews with Lenape elders. Together, the stories welcome you into their rich and wondrous imaginative world.

About the Authors:

Camilla Townsend, a New York native, is the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of numerous books on Indigenous history, among them Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004), Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico (2006), and Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (2019), which won the 2020 Cundill Prize in History. Her research has received support from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Nicky Kay Michael, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Bemidji State University and a visiting professor at the University of Wyoming. Nicky Kay Michael (Delaware) has served as a council member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and has worked in the field of American Indian Studies for more than two decades.