Seeds to Stories: Exploring Traditional Foods of the Haudenosaunee  

This program is offered as a pilot following the January 2024 closure of the severely outdated Hall of Eastern Woodlands. (Read more about why the Museum closed this exhibition in this letter from Museum President Sean Decatur). 

How to Register 

• The program is free for New York City school groups. Each session is limited to 32 students.
• This 90-minute program is offered at 10:30 am, Monday–Friday, beginning Tuesday, October 15, and includes time for bagged lunch in the classroom.
• Call 212-769-5200, 9 am–5 pm, to make a reservation for your school group.

Program Details

In this 90-minute program, developed with Seneca educator Marissa Corwin Manitowabi and facilitated by Museum educators, students will learn about traditional and contemporary foodways of the Haudenosaunee, the confederacy of six Native Nations known as the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora whose homelands include much of New York State.

The experience includes a hands-on classroom activity, a film about agricultural practices in Haudenosaunee communities today, produced by Seneca filmmaker Caleb Abrams, and a break for bagged lunch in the classroom. (Students should bring their own lunches. Food is not provided.)

After lunch, students will end their field trip experience with a visit to the recently renovated Northwest Coast Hall to compare approaches to cultural storytelling 

The program centers on concepts related to Cultural Continuity and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. These concepts merge social studies and science standards. Students will explore agricultural and food-related objects to appreciate how Haudenosaunee foodways are part of a web of connections between the Haudenosaunee peoples, their lands, communities, and celebrations in New York State today.  

Using a critical lens, students will consider key questions about representing cultures, such as:  How the complexities of a culture group cannot be understood simply by looking at items on display—and why partnerships with Indigenous communities are essential to understanding human relationships, history, and knowledge behind these pieces.  

This program builds on the Museum’s ongoing efforts to collaborate with Indigenous communities, including to present and foreground contemporary perspectives of Native peoples in exhibitions and programming. Students will be invited to learn about historical approaches to cultural exhibits–including the now-closed Hall of Eastern Woodlands, which did not include the stories or perspectives of Indigenous communities–and to compare this approach to more recent initiatives. A visit to the Museum’s Northwest Coast Hall, which re-opened in 2022, will give students the opportunity to learn about multiple Native Nations in their own voices. 

Students will come away from this field trip experience with an understanding of the importance of traditional foods to Haudenosaunee people today as well as the importance of first-person perspectives in cultural storytelling.