Making the Worlds (Presence) | Open Room x Forge Project

Thursday, May 21, 7–9pm, join Bonney Hartley and Wunetu Wequai Tarrant for an evening of readings, screenings, and conversation at Performance Space New York as part of Forge Project’s year-long installation and residency in PSNY’s OPEN ROOM.

Over the course of the evening, Bonney Hartley will read a selection of her poetic work and Wunetu Wequai Tarrant will screen Shinnecock Succotash Cooking and She Sits With Me, two short films made by Ayim Kutoowonk [She Speaks], a Shinnecock women’s language group. Hartley and Tarrant will then join Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yaktitʸutitʸu yaktiłhini [Northern Chumash]), Forge Project Director of Relational Education, in conversation about their personal and community-based work.

Language, visual media, and poetics are among methods used since time immemorial to document histories, shared knowledge, and deepen political, social, and cultural practice. While the mediums we use may shift over time, this speaks to the ongoing nature of Indigenous ways of knowing and being - that endure and expand beyond the limitation of colonial imagination. Highlighting the confluence of communities from what is now New York City and Long Island,  Making the Worlds (Presence) centers the ongoing relationships homeland communities maintain through embodied, creative, and relational practice.  

About the Participants

Bonney Hartley is a member of Stockbridge-Munsee Community and founding member of Mohican Writers Circle. She holds a Master of Social Science degree from University of Cape Town and is a recent MFA-Creative Writing graduate from the Institute of American Indian Arts for Poetry. Her work has been featured in Stonecoast Review, The Last Milkweed (Tupelo Press), Nature of our Times (Paloma Press) and Boundless (Amherst College Press), among others. She is a 2024 and 2025 Indigenous Nations Poets fellow and a 2025 Forge Project Fellow. Bonney lives in Mohican homelands in Massachusetts and serves her Tribe as a repatriation specialist.

Wunetu Wequai Tarrant is a member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, located on the East End of Long Island, NY. She grew up with her family on the Shinnecock reservation peninsula. Wunetu has been inspired by her grandmother and matriarch of the ThunderBird clan, Elizabeth ‘Chee Chee’ ThunderBird Haile, to promote cultural preservation and education. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Alfred University in 2011 and is currently a Linguistics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona focusing on the reconstruction and revitalization of the Shinnecock dialect of Southern New England Algonquian.