Reimagining the Enslaved African Burial Ground at Van Cortlandt Park

Through SunSum Collective, GROUND3D contributed to the Reimagining the Enslaved African Burial Ground Design Ideas Lab, a Design Trust for Public Space and Van Cortlandt Park Alliance initiative focused on future memorialization and stewardship at Van Cortlandt Park.

Our work began from the understanding that the burial ground is not an isolated site, but part of a larger sacred landscape shaped by Lenape presence, African and Indigenous enslavement, ecological transformation, and generations of descendant care. The park still carries the imprint of colonial extraction, from the Van Cortlandt plantation landscape to Hester and Piero’s Mill Pond, Mosholu / Tibbetts Brook, agricultural fields, roads, and the everyday infrastructures that continue to organize the site.

For SunSum Collective, meaningful repair required more than historical markers or commemorative gestures. It called for a systemic reimagining of the landscape as a place of truth-telling, remembrance, cultural resurgence, and reciprocal stewardship. We approached the burial ground as a living sacred grove: a place where ancestors, descendants, waters, plants, animals, soils, and ecological communities remain in relationship.

The proposal drew from African, Afro-diasporic, and Indigenous spatial traditions to imagine a landscape where movement is not simply a path to a destination, but a journey through memory, reflection, and return. The Kongo Cosmogram, sacred groves, ancestral stewardship practices, Lenape seasonal knowledge, Sankofa, Adinkra symbolism, ethnobotanical planting, and vernacular African spatial forms informed a design language rooted in cyclical time, collective care, and more-than-human kinship.

Across the site, sacred groves, interpretive pathways, gathering spaces, planted mounds, public art, low-impact boardwalks, altars, reflective moments, and ethnobotanical plantings work together to support ceremony, ecological restoration, public learning, and ongoing cultural practice. Rather than separating memorialization from everyday park life, the design holds reverence and access together, inviting visitors to learn, gather, reflect, and participate in the continued care of the land.

The work privileges stewardship over spectacle and remembrance over monumentality. It seeks to make the histories of enslavement more visible while protecting the sacred character of the burial ground and honoring the descendant communities, cultural stewards, ancestors, and more-than-human worlds whose presence continues to shape Van Cortlandt Park.