Lenape
The Lenape or Lenni-Lenape (later named Delaware Indians by Europeans) were, in the 1600s, loosely organized bands of Native American people practicing 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 encountered by Henry Hudson when he entered New York Bay in 1609.
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2 History 3 Notable Members of the Lenni-Lenape 4 Further Reading 5 External Links |
Their language was in the Algonquian language family and had two main dialects. Proto-Munsee was spoken in the upper Delaware River (including North Jersey), New York, and Long Island Sound. Proto-Unami was the dialect spoken in the lower Delaware River (including South Jersey). In the Unami dialect, "Lenape" means "our men," "men of the same nation," "common people," etc. The Lenape name for the area they inhabited was Lenapehoking, which meant "place where the Lenape dwell."
In colonial times, families were organized into clans based on a common female ancestor. Phratries, which were groups of two or more clans, were identified by an animal sign. Children were members of their mother's phratry.
Land was assigned to a particular clan for hunting, fishing, and cultivation. Invidual 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). Phratries lived in a fixed settlements, using the surrounding areas for communal hunting and planting until the land was exhausted, at which point the group moved on to found a new settlement.
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 using metal tools acquired from the Europeans. In May, the Lenape planted kidney beans in the vicinity of the maize plants to serve as props. 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 in 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 Ackingsah-sack (Hackensack River) 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 easily killed. 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 eventually resulted in a disaster with the decline 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 intended loss of their lands. After the Dutch arrival in the 1620s, the Lenape were successfully able 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 settelment west of the Hudson.
The Lenape were the first native american tribe to enter into a treaty with the future United States government during the American Revolutionary War. The Lenape supplied the revoluntary 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.
The Lenape were continually crowded out by European settlers and pressured to move in several stages over a period of about 175 years with the main body arriving in Northeast Oklahoma in the 1860s. Along the way many smaller groups split off in different directions to settle, to join established communities with other native peoples, or 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:
The Oklahoma branches were established in 1867, with the purchase of land by Delawares from the Cherokee nation; two payments totalling $438,000 were made. A court dispute then followed over whether the sale included rights for the Delaware within the Cherokee nation. In 1895 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 that in 1867 they had only purchased rights to the land for their lifetimes. The lands were allotted in 160-acre lots in 1907, with any land left over sold to whites.
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.
Language
History
Colonial times
The Nineteenth Century
Most members of the Munsee branch of the Lenape live on three reserves in Western Ontario.Notable Members of the Lenni-Lenape
Further Reading
External Links