The Lenape or Lenni-Lenape (later named Delaware Indians by Europeans) were, in the 1600s, loosely organized bands of Native American
peoples with shared cultural and linguistic characteristics.
They practiced small-scale agriculture to augment a largely mobile hunter-gatherer society in the region around the Delaware River,
the lower Hudson River, and western Long Island
Sound.
The Lenape were the people living in New Jersey, the vicinity of New York Harbor, and in the Delaware Valley at the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and continue to live in this area today. Their
Algonquian language is known as either Lenape or "Delaware".
History
Map showing the
Lenapehoking region traditionally occupied by the Lenape.
Early Indian "tribes" are perhaps better understood as language groups, rather than as "nations." A Lenape individual would have identified primarily with his or her immediate family and friends, or
village unit; then with surrounding and familiar village units; next with more distant neighbors who spoke the same dialect; and
ultimately, while often fitfully, with all those in the surrounding area who spoke mutually comprehensible languages, including
the Mahican. Among other Algonquian peoples the
Lenape were considered the "grandfathers" from whom all the other Algonquian peoples originated. Consequently, in inter-tribal
councils, the Lenape were given the respect as one would to their elders.
Those of a different language stock — such as the Iroquois (or, in the Lenape language, the
Minqua) — were regarded as foreigners, often, as in the case of the Iroquois, with
animosity spanning many generations. (Interestingly, ethnicity itself seems to have mattered little to the Lenape and many other
"tribes," as illustrated by archaeological discoveries of Munsee burials that included identifiably ethnic-Iroquois remains
carefully interred along with the ethnic-Algonquian Munsee ones. The two groups were bitter enemies since before recorded
history, although intermarriage, perhaps through captive-taking, clearly occurred).
Overlaying these relationships was a phratry system, a division into clans. Clan membership was matrilineal, that is, children inherited
membership in a clan from their mother. On reaching adulthood, a Lenape traditionally married
outside of the clan, a practice known by ethnographers as, "exogamy", which effectively served to prevent inbreeding, even among individuals whose kinship was obscure or
unknown.
Early Europeans who first wrote about Indians found matrilineal social organization to be unfamiliar and perplexing. As a
result, Europeans often tried to interpret Lenape society through more familiar European arrangements. As a result, the early
records are full of clues about early Lenape society, but were usually written by observers who did not fully understand what
they were seeing. For example, a man's closest male ancestor was usually considered to be his maternal uncle (his mother's
brother) and not his father, since his father belonged to a different clan. Such a concept was often unfathomable to early
European chroniclers.
Land was assigned to a particular clan for hunting, fishing, and cultivation. Individual private ownership of land was
unknown, but rather the land belonged to the clan collectively while they inhabited it (see New Amsterdam for discussion of the Dutch "purchase" of
Manhattan). Clans lived in fixed settlements, using the surrounding areas for communal hunting
and planting until the land was exhausted, at which point the group moved on to find a new settlement within their
territories.
European contact
The early interaction between the Lenape and the Dutch was primarily through the fur trade,
specifically the exchange of beaver pelts by the Lenape for European-made goods.
According to Dutch settler Isaac de Rasieres, who observed the Lenape in 1628, the
Lenape's primary crop was maize, which they planted in March after breaking up the soil. The metal
tools of the Europeans were adopted quickly for this task. In May, the Lenape planted kidney
beans in the vicinity of the maize plants which would serve as props for the climbing vines. The summers were devoted to
field work and the crops were harvested in August. Most of the field work was carried out by women, with the agricultural work of
men limited to clearing the field and breaking the soil.
Hunting was the primary activity during the rest of the year. Dutch settler David de Vries, who
stayed in the area from 1634 to 1644, described a Lenape hunt in the valley of the Achinigeu-hach (or "Ackingsah-sack," the
Hackensack River), in which one hundred or more men stood in a line many paces from
each other, beating thigh bones on their palms to drive animals to the river, where they could be killed easily. Other methods of
hunting included lassoing and drowning deer, as well as forming a circle around prey and setting the brush on fire.
The quick dependence of the Lenape on European goods, and the need for fur to trade with the Europeans, eventually resulted in
a disaster with an over-harvesting of the beaver population in the lower Hudson. The fur source thus exhausted, the Dutch shifted
their operations to present-day Upstate New York. The Lenape population fell into
disease and decline. Likewise, the differences in conceptions of property rights between the
Europeans and the Lenape resulted in widespread confusion among the Lenape and the loss of their lands. After the Dutch arrival
in the 1620s, the Lenape were successful in their efforts to restrict Dutch settlement to present-day Jersey City along the Hudson until the 1660s, when the Dutch finally established a garrison at
Fort Bergen, allowing settlement west of the Hudson within the province of New Netherlands.
The Treaty of Easton, signed between the Lenape and the English in 1766, removed
them westward, out of present-day New York and New Jersey and into Pennsylvania, then Ohio and beyond — although sporadic raids
on English settlers continued, staged from far outside the area.
The Lenape were the first Indian tribe to enter into a treaty with the future United States government during the American
Revolutionary War. The Lenape supplied the Revolutionary army with warriors and scouts in exchange for food supplies and the
promise of a role at the head of a future native American state[1].
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
In the early nineteenth century, a naturalist named Rafinesque
"discovered" the Walam Olum, an alleged religious history of the Lenape, which was published
in 1836. However, only Rafinesque's manuscript has come down to us; the tablets that his writings
were based upon either were never found, or never existed. Some consider the document a hoax.
The Lenape continually were crowded out by European settlers and pressed to move in several stages over a period of 175 years,
with the main body arriving in the Northeast region of Oklahoma in the 1860s. Along the way
many smaller groups struck off in different directions to settle, to join established communities with other native peoples, or,
electing to stay where they were and survive when their brothers and sisters moved on. Consequently today, from New Jersey to Wisconsin to southwest Oklahoma, there are groups which
retain a sense of identity with their ancestors that were in the Delaware Valley in the 1600s and with their cousins in the vast
Lenape diaspora. The two largest are:
Most members of the Munsee branch of the Lenape live on three Indian reserves in
Western Ontario, Canada, the largest being that at Moraviantown, Ontario where the Turtle clan settled in 1792.
The Oklahoma branches were established in 1867, with the purchase of land by Delawares from the Cherokee nation; two payments totaling $438,000 were made. A court dispute then followed over whether the sale
included rights for the Delaware within the Cherokee nation. In 1898, the Curtis Act dissolved
tribal governments and ordered the allotment of tribal lands to individual members of tribes. The Lenape fought the act in the
courts, but lost: the courts ruling, in 1867, that they had only purchased rights to the land for their lifetimes. The lands were
allotted in 160 acre (650,000 m²) lots in 1907, with any land left over sold to non-Indians.
In 1979, the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs revoked the tribal
status of the Delaware living among Cherokee in Oklahoma, and included the Delaware as Cherokee. This decision was finally
overturned in 1996. The Cherokee nation then filed suit to overturn the recognition of the Delaware as a tribe.
In 2000, the Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma took possession of 11.5 acres of land in Pennsylvania[2]. The Lenape are not a
federally recognized tribe in the United States. The Delaware Tribe of Oklahoma, Bartlesville, are in negotiations to become
recognized by the U.S. with the support of the Cherokee Nation, located in Oklahoma also.
Lenape nations today
Notable Lenape Indians
In the seventeenth century:
-
In the French and Indian War (1754-63) era:
-
- Neolin -- the "Delaware Prophet"
- Teedyuscung -- "King" of the eastern Delawares
- Shingas -- Turkey clan war leader
- Tamaqua -- Turkey clan civil leader, aka "King Beaver"
In the American Revolution (1776-83) era:
-
References to the Lenape in literature
The Delawares feature prominently in The Last of the Mohicans and the
other Leatherstocking Tales of James
Fenimore Cooper.
The Delawares are the subject of a legend which inspired the Boy Scouts of
America honor society known as the Order of the Arrow.
The Walam Olum, which purported to be an account of the Delawares' migration to the
lands around the Delaware River, emerged through the works of Rafinesque
in the nineteenth century and was considered by scholars for many decades to be genuine, until around the 1980s and 1990s, when
newer textual analysis suggested it was a hoax. Nonetheless, some Delawares, upon hearing of it for the first time, found the
account to be plausible.
In Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
the group of American head hunters are aided by two Delaware Indians, who serve as scouts and guides through the western
deserts.
In Philip Roth's 2004 novel, The Plot
Against America, there is a brief mention of "a band of Lenni Lenapes" who "were said by… [a] third-grade teacher to
have lived" near the protagonists in present-day Newark, New Jersey.
In The Light in the Forest, True Son is adopted by a band of
Lenapes.
Further reading
- Adams, Richard Calmit, The Delaware Indians, a brief history, Hope Farm Press (Saugerties, NY 1995) [originally
published by Government Printing Office, (Washington, DC 1909)]
- Brown, James W. and Rita T. Kohn, eds. Long Journey Home ISBN
978-0-253-34968-2 Indiana University Press (2007).
- Burrows, Edward G. and Wallace, Mike, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1989 ISBN 0-19-514049-4 Oxford Univ. Press
(1999).
- Jackson, Kenneth T. (editor) The Encyclopedia of New York City ISBN 0-300-05536-6 Yale University Press (1995).
- Kraft, Herbert C., The Lenape: archaeology, history and ethnography, New Jersey Historical Society, (Newark, NJ
1986)
- O'Meara, John, Delaware-English / English-Delaware dictionary, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, 1996) ISBN
0-8020-0670-1.
- O'Meara, John, Delaware reference grammar, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, 2006) ISBN 0-8020-4386-0.
- Otto, Paul, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2006). ISBN 1-57181-672-0
- Weslager, Clinton Alfred, The Delaware Indians: A history, Rutgers University Press, (New Brunswick, NJ 1972).
- Richter, Conrad, The Light In The Forest, (New York, NY 1953)
See also
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
- Powhatan — Possible relatives of, and certainly bearing a language close to the one of, the
Lenapes
External links
References
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