Painter Joe Baker recalls drinking sassafrass tea—a traditional Lenape beverage with a taste akin to root beer—as a child. The sassafras tree holds historic significance for the Lenape people, and in Three Sisters, Baker uses the distinctive shape of its three-lobed leaves to represent the spirits of Stella, Betty, and Pearl Fugate, his grandmother and her two sisters.¹ Their sky-blue forms rise from the forest floor, reaching for the canopy as if with outstretched arms. Smoke from the Eastern cedar, used by the Lenape for purification, emits from cinders behind them.

       The painting honors women whose lives intersected a time of critical change for the Lenape people in Oklahoma. In the late nineteenth century, members of the Lenape tribe, along with the Osage people, found themselves in the epicenter of an oil rush after significant deposits of oil were discovered on allotment lands in Oklahoma. In 1900, the Nellie Johnstone Well, which was named after the Lenape woman who owned the land on which it was dug, became the first commercially successful oil well in the state and marked the beginning of Oklahoma's oil rush.² Baker’s family were among those who profited from the oil found on their land. A photograph of the three sisters taken as they left for finishing school at Cottey College in the early 1900s depicts the young women in highly fashionable fur trimmed coats, a testament to the family’s wealth and social standing [fig. 1]. Yet, like many other successful Delaware and Osage people, the artist’s family suffered tragedy in the wake of oil’s discovery on their properties, as white businessmen attempted to wrest control of the land away from Native people. Stella, the artist’s grandmother, was murdered by poisoning in 1924. The tragedy was silenced with no investigation; the perpetrators were never caught.

      Through its melding of familial history and oral tradition, The Three Sisters is a potent, culturally-specific rumination on memory, mourning, and celebration. The work not only depicts a reunion of the spirits of Stella, Betty, and Pearl, but also a suggests a return to their traditional homelands, far from the plains of Oklahoma. Though the Lenape people now reside in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario, prior to colonization, their land, called the Lenapehoking, consisted of what is now known as New Jersey, as well as parts of Pennsylvania, New York, and western Connecticut. With its thick bramble of trees and shrubs glowing by ember light in the darkness of the forest floor, the painting evokes not the fields and grasslands of the Midwest, but rather the once-dense woodlands of the Atlantic coast. And though the work is a tribute to the artist’s grandmother and her sisters, Baker also notes that the imagery of the women rising to the forest canopy recalls the Lenape story of the creation of the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters.³ In the narrative, the elders sent for pure hearted children to pray to the Creator to atone for the adults' wrongdoings. As they prayed, the children rose into the air, prompting the women of the village to hit them with clothing in an attempt to save them, causing some to fall back to earth. The seven girls who never returned become the star constellation, which burns, like the sassafras leaves of the painting, bright and piercing blue.

¹ Conversation with the artist, January 4, 2022.

² B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells, “First Oklahoma Oil Well,” American Oil and Gas Historical Society, last modified April 8, 2022, https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/first-oklahoma-oil-well/.

³ “Nèk Ansisktayèsàk,” Lenape Talking Dictionary, 2022, accessed February 3, 2022, https://www.talk-lenape.org/stories?id=74.


Images courtesy Joe Baker.