Widoktadwen Center for Native Knowledge

Widoktadwen Center for Native Knowledge is an intertribal community center for local Indigenous people, families, and allies, centering Indigenous knowledge, culture, and traditions. Our cultural resource center and library is located on ancestral Lenape land, in the lower level of Zion Spies Lutheran Church. 

Widoktadwen in the Potawatomi language means community. The root of this word roughly translates to together, with each other, or helping each other. Our name literally translates to the Community Center for Native Knowledge.

Relationships are the living and beating heart of a healthy community, and as Native people we seek to live in right relationship with each other, Mother Earth, and our Creator. It was important to us to include that ethos of a healthy community grounded in our relationships in our name and our mission.

We strongly believe that only a cultural shift in mindset, values, and priorities will create the lasting positive change we seek in our society. We are aware of the deeper ills that afflict our society, like consumerism, greed, individualism, prejudice, and fear. We’ve learned to value money and commodities over health and life–and, friends, we are due for a cultural shift. We still live in a world that oppresses countercultural narratives and targets people of color, and our society is largely ignorant of the ways in which these behaviors stem from corrupt systems designed to serve white supremacy and the idea of a single American culture. But together, as a community, we can begin to break down the oppressive systems that no longer (or never did) serve us and build something far greater.

Community is the medicine. We are the medicine.