Lenape
The Lenape, also called the Lenni Lenape and Delaware people, are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who live in the United States and Canada.
The Lenape's historical territory included present-day northeastern Delaware, all of New Jersey, the eastern Pennsylvania regions of the Lehigh Valley and Northeastern Pennsylvania, and New York Bay, western Long Island, and the lower Hudson Valley in New York state. Today communities are based in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.
During the last decades of the 18th century, European settlers and the effects of the American Revolutionary War displaced most Lenape from their homelands and pushed them north and west. In the 1860s, under the Indian removal policy, the U.S. federal government relocated most Lenape remaining in the Eastern United States to the Indian Territory and surrounding regions.
Federally recognized Lenape tribes are the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma, and the Stockbridge–Munsee Community in Wisconsin. Lenape in Canada are the Munsee-Delaware Nation, Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and the Delaware First Nation of the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario.
Name
The name Lenni Lenape originates from two autonyms, Lenni, which means "genuine, pure, real, original", and Lenape, meaning "real person" or "original person". Lënu may be translated as "man". Adam DePaul, member of the unrecognized Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, calls the name "an anglicized grammatical error that basically translates as the 'original people people.'" While acknowledging that some Lenape do identify as Lenni Lenape or Delaware, DePaul says "the best word to use when referring to us is simply 'Lenape.'"When first encountered by European settlers, the Lenape were a loose association of closely related peoples who spoke similar languages and shared familial bonds in an area known as Lenapehoking, the Lenape historical territory, which spanned what is now eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Lower New York Bay, and eastern Delaware.
The tribe's common name Delaware comes from the French language. English colonists named the Delaware River for the first governor of the Province of Virginia, Lord De La Warr. The British colonists began to call the Lenape the Delaware Indians because of where they lived.
Swedish colonists also settled in the area, and Swedish sources called the Lenape the Renappi.
Historical homelands
The historical Lenape country, Lenapehoking, was a large territory that encompassed the Delaware and Lehigh Valley regions of eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey from the north bank of the Lehigh River along the west bank of the Delaware River into Delaware and the Delaware Bay. Their lands also extended west from western Long Island and New York Bay, across the Lower Hudson Valley in New York to the lower Catskills and a sliver of the upper edge of the North Branch Susquehanna River. On the west side, the Lenape lived in several small towns along the rivers and streams that fed the waterways, and likely shared the hunting territory of the Schuylkill River watershed with the rival Iroquoian Susquehannock.Today, the Munsee-Delaware Nation has its own Indian reserve, Munsee-Delaware Nation 1, in southwest Ontario. The Delaware Nation at Moraviantown has a small, reserve in Chatham-Kent, Ontario. The Delaware of Six Nations shares the Glebe Farm 40B in Brantford, Ontario, and Six Nations Indian Reserve No. 40, shared with six Haudenosaunee peoples in Ontario.
The Stockbridge-Munsee Community has a Indian reservation in Wisconsin, with held in federal trust. The Delaware Nation has a tribal jurisdictional area in Caddo County, Oklahoma, that they share with the Caddo Nation and Wichita and Affiliated Tribes.
Languages
The Unami and Munsee languages belong to the Eastern Algonquian language group and are largely mutually intelligible. Moravian missionary John Heckewelder wrote that Munsee and Unami "came out of one parent language." As of 2023, only a few Delaware First Nation elders in Moraviantown, Ontario, fluently speak Munsee.William Penn, who first met the Lenape in 1682, said the Unami used the following words: "mother" was anna, "brother" was isseemus and "friend" was netap. He instructed his fellow English colonists: "If one asks them for anything they have not, they will answer, mattá ne hattá, which to translate is, 'not I have,' instead of 'I have not'."
The Lenape languages were once exclusively spoken languages. In 2002, the Delaware Tribe of Indians received grant money to fund The Lenape Talking Dictionary, preserving and digitizing the Southern Unami dialect.
Society
Clans and kinship systems
At the time of European settlement in North America, a Lenape would have identified primarily with their immediate family and clan, friends, and village unit and, after that, with surrounding and familiar village units followed by more distant neighbors who spoke the same dialect, and finally, with those in the surrounding area who spoke mutually comprehensible languages, including the Nanticoke people who lived to their south and west in present western Delaware and eastern Maryland.Among many Algonquian peoples along the East Coast, the Lenape were considered the grandfathers from whom other Algonquian-speaking peoples originated.
The Lenape had three clans at the end of the 17th century, each of which historically had twelve sub-clans. The three primary Lenape clans are: Wolf, Turtle, and Turkey. The Lenape clan system is matrilineal, and historically they were a matrilocal society, that is, husbands moved into their wife's homes. Children belong to their mother's clan, from which they gain social status and identity. Within a marriage itself, men and women had relatively separate and equal rights, each controlling their own property and debts, showing further signs of a woman's power in the hierarchical structure.
Hunting, fishing, and farming
Lenape practiced companion planting, in which women cultivated many varieties of the Three Sisters: maize, beans, and squash. Men hunted, fished, and otherwise harvested seafood. In the 17th century, the Lenape practiced slash and burn agriculture. They used fire to manage land. Controlled use of fire extended farmlands' productivity. According to Dutch settler Isaac de Rasieres, who observed the Lenape in 1628, the Lenape planted their primary crop, maize, in March. Over time, the Lenape adapted to European methods of hunting and farming with metal tools.The men limited their agricultural labor to clearing the field and breaking the soil. They primarily hunted and fished during the rest of the year: from September to January and from June to July, they mainly hunted deer, but from the month of January to the spring planting in May, they hunted anything from bears and beavers to raccoons and foxes. 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, in which 100 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. They also harvested vast quantities of fish and shellfish from the bays of the area, and, in southern New Jersey, harvested clams year-round. One technique used while fishing was to add ground chestnuts to stream water to make fish dizzy and easier to catch.
The success of these methods allowed the tribe to maintain a larger population than other, nomadic hunter-gatherer peoples in North America at the time, could support. Scholars have estimated that at the time of European settlement, around much of the current New York City area alone, there may have been about 15,000 Lenape in approximately 80 settlement sites. In 1524, Lenape in canoes met Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first European explorer to enter New York Harbor.
European settlers and traders from the 17th-century colonies of New Netherland and New Sweden traded with the Lenape for agricultural products, mainly maize, in exchange for iron tools. The Lenape also arranged contacts between the Minquas or Susquehannocks and the Dutch West India Company and Swedish South Company to promote the fur trade. The Lenape were major producers of labor-intensive wampum, or shell beads, which they traditionally used for ritual purposes and as ornaments. After the Dutch arrival, they began to exchange wampum for beaver furs provided by Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock and other Minquas. They exchanged these furs for Dutch and, from the late 1630s, also Swedish imports. Relations between some Lenape and Minqua polities briefly turned sour in the late 1620s and early 1630s, but were relatively peaceful most of the time.