Ethnos

Delaware

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.

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).

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.***