The 20th Drums Along the Hudson 2022 Native American and Multicultural drum festival is at Inwood Hills Park in Inwood, Manhattan on Sun, Jun 5, 2022 from 11am – 6pm. Free. drumsalongthehudson.org 🇺🇸🇧🇷🇬🇪🇲🇽🇰🇷
Drums Along the Hudson 2022
This is basically a Pow-Wow (Native American gathering) on the site of Manhattan’s Lenape village in what is now Inwood Hills Park.
It features drummers and dancers from around the world, Native American Pow Wow, international foods and artisanal crafts.
2022 Honorees
2022 Honorees include:
- Katsitsionni Fox, Akwesasne Mohawk artist, filmmaker and educator.
- Hezues R, filmmaker (S.I.C. Film School) and producer (Creative Gods Agency).
- Oren Lyons, Onondaga Council of Chiefs.
2022 Performers
2022 Performers include:
- Tom Porter, Mohawk Elder. 🇺🇸
- Louis Mofsie, Hopi & Winnebago, Thunderbird American Indian Dancers. 🇺🇸
- Thunderbird American Indian Dancers.🇺🇸
- Allegany River Seneca Nation Dancers and Singers.🇺🇸
- Sonhee Lee, Korean dancers and drummers. 🇰🇷
- Kinding Sindaw, Filipino dancers. 🇵🇭
- Dancing Crane Georgian Ensemble. 🇬🇪
- Batalá NYC, Afro-Brazilian Women Drummers. 🇧🇷
- Kalpulli Huehuethlatholi Aztec Drummers and Dancers. 🇲🇽
- Patrice C. Queen Women’s Drumming Circle. 🇺🇸
Inwood Hills Park is Sacred Ground
Inwood Hills Park is the site of the precolonial Native American Lenape village. Of course, they chose the most beautiful place on the island for their village. It’s hard to believe you are in Manhattan, now one of the world’s most built up places.
The Lenape people called the place “Shorakapok” (edge of the water). In their time, Spuyten Duyvil Creek did not go through to the Harlem River. It was just a small bay and wetlands.
Broadway was the Lenape Trail to the trading post at the southern tip of Manhattan where the National Museum of the American Indian is now. That is why it runs diagonally. The trail was made long before the Europeans came and made the Manhattan street grid.
So Inwood Hills Park is sacred ground.
The Drum is Universal
Every culture in the world plays the drum. After voice, the drum was probably the first human instrument.
Colonizers feared the drum because we could use it to communicate across hundreds of miles, faster than a telegraph. They used guns to silence our drums.
But the people know that the call of the drum is a call to gather together in peace. That is the meaning of the Malian West African word for drum “Djembe.”
Studying Indigenous drum traditions, one can’t help but notice how similar drum traditions are – all around the world and across time.