Sapponckanikan (Tobacco Field)

Sapponckanikan (Tobacco Field), created in 2019 by Alan Michelson with Steven Fragale, is a site-specific augmented reality app for the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art that places viewers in a circle of tobacco plants.

Four hundred years ago, when the Dutch arrived in what is now Manhattan, there was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapponckanikan (tobacco field), near what is currently the foot of Gansevoort Street close to the Museum. Sapponckanikan (Tobacco Field) recalls and honors the Lenape and their tobacco field by surrounding users of the app with a recreation of the plants that originally occupied the site. Users are prompted to tap the screen to place and launch the circle of plants.

The tobacco the Lenape grew at the site was not the commercial strain cultivated for the European, and later the American market, and it was not casually smoked. It was, and remains, a sacred herb used ceremonially by Native people across Turtle Island, the Indigenous name for North America. Alan Michelson, a New York-based Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River, based the ring of tobacco on the plants in his sister’s garden at Six Nation Reserve.