The city is removing 48 heritage trees from FDR Park. The Lenape Nation will be honoring them with a ceremony.

Shelley DePaul’s book, Ethnobotany of the Lenape Indians, page after page showcases photos of the different plants native to Lenape land. And many of those pictures are from the meadows at FDR Park in South Philly.

“These plants — which have ancient names, there’s ancient knowledge around them, their medicinal value, their culinary value, their ceremonial value — are still here, are still with us,” said Anisa George, who is learning the Lenape language from DePaul, a teacher and member of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania.

It’s that relationship to the land that’s inherently important to the Lenape people. As the Indigenous people who never left their land, the Lenape view themselves as the caretakers of the land, the Delaware River, and each other. And each living organism that makes up that ecosystem — plants, bugs, animals, trees — is viewed as a relative.

This year they learned the city would soon be demolishing and removing 441 trees in FDR Park, 48 of which are heritage trees, as part of the master plan to reimagine the park’s 348-acre space. The $250 million plan, of which the first phase broke ground in May 2022, includes transforming the meadows into 12 multipurpose athletic fields, four fields dedicated to baseball and softball, and a wetland and hill that would help mitigate the park’s chronic flooding. Heritage trees are defined as large trees with unique value based on their ecological or historical value.

» READ MORE: FDR Park community meeting draws hundreds, starts off in tense face-off

The city says this renovation will help maximize the park’s usage and render it more climate-resilient. Some of the heritage trees are dying or will be dead within the next 10 to 15 years because of climate change. Under the plan, 7,000 new trees will be planted to replace the 48, along with 1,700 new shrubs in the 33-acre wetland.

But some residents have since objected to the plan, particularly the overhaul of the meadows, with concerns about conserving what little natural green space is left in Philadelphia. In January, the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania joined the outcry with an open letter to Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, asking for a reconsideration of the renovations.

Ahead of the removal of the heritage trees at the meadows, the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania will hold a ceremony to honor the trees “on death row” on Sunday at 1 p.m. It is their way of continued protest. The ceremony is expected to include a drumming circle and the creation of prayer ties to wrap around the tree trunks. The Inquirer spoke with a tribe member and member of the coalition Save the Meadows about the Lenape relationship to the land, their thoughts on the park renovation, and their intentions with Sunday’s ceremony.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Shelley DePaul: It’s not a provincial issue. It’s a universal issue, and it’s an environmental issue.

Lenape people do not view the world as geographic units of individual human beings. They view the world as it was created. We consider these trees our elders. It’s hard to understand how a Native American views these things unless you’ve really considered this fact, that we consider them our relations.

Anisa George: Something that I’ve learned from Teacher Shelley is the idea of Lenapehoking, and the idea of a people that are tied to a watershed. This is a culture that grew like the ecosystem around the Delaware River — it’s Jersey, it’s Eastern Pennsylvania, it goes down to Delaware and that southern portion of New York state. We have to go into state boundaries, but what it actually is underneath all of those layers of colonization is this relationship to water. That is something I feel really deeply in FDR, because it’s built on wetlands. [George is a member of the Save the Meadows organization.]

George: It’s this tangle of streams, it’s soggy underfoot. This ecosystem supports 40% of biodiversity worldwide, it’s second only to coral reefs in terms of its [ecological] value, and it’s disappearing three times faster than our forests because cities were built by rivers, so cities keep filling in their wetlands to make more space. The destruction of wetlands is about the hunger of the urban landscape, these things have been in opposition. And we’re seeing it at FDR Park right now.

DePaul: Planting new trees is not going to replace the habitat that each of these trees support. You’ve got the birds, the bugs, the fertilization that they get to the soil. It’s a whole habitat for each specific tree. And it’s a very serious thing for our people.

DePaul: We fully agree that that is a very important mission. We are caretakers of the land, the river, and each other. We wholeheartedly believe in that. However, the approach that [the city is] taking doesn’t seem to be focused on that. Why not put sports complexes throughout Philadelphia, where they are accessible to most of the youth, instead of this huge complex in southern Philadelphia? There are many, many other spaces in Philadelphia that this could be done without causing environmental damage.

George: What kills me about it is that there are spaces in the city where you could build fields, and it would be ecological service to the city, as well as filling the civic needs to have spaces for children to play sports.

DePaul: It definitely has an impact. It comes from the fact that the people involved in this colonization do not inherently understand Black and brown and Indigenous communities, the way they perceive things, and what a great loss it is to them.

DePaul: In case we cannot convince them somehow to not do away with these heritage trees, the sole purpose of this meeting is to hold ceremony for the trees, so that at least we have given them our love and respect. We want to stay focused on that. We don’t want any dissent. In a sense, you could call it a protest, but it’s not really a protest, it’s more honoring of the trees.