Lenape
The Lenape (English: /ləˈnɑːpi/, /-peɪ/, /ˈlɛnəpi/;[7][8] Lenape languages: [lənaːpe][9]), also called the Lenni Lenape[10] and Delaware people,[11] are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who live in the United States and Canada.[4]
For other uses, see Lenape (disambiguation).
Lënapeyok
The Lenape's historical territory includes 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.[notes 1] Today they 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[12] 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. Lenape people currently belong to the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma, the Stockbridge–Munsee Community in Wisconsin, and the Munsee-Delaware Nation, Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and Delaware of Six Nations in Ontario.
Name[edit]
The full name Lenni Lenape originates from two autonyms, Lenni, which means "genuine, pure, real, original", and Lenape, meaning "real person" or "original person"[13] lënu may be translated as "man".[14]
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,[1] 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.[15]
Languages[edit]
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"/[18] Only a few Delaware First Nation elders in Moraviantown, Ontario, fluently speak Munsee.[19]
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'."[20]
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.[21]
History[edit]
European contact[edit]
The first recorded European contact with people presumed to have been the Lenape was in 1524. The explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was greeted by local Lenape who came by canoe, after his ship entered what is now called Lower New York Bay.
Early colonial era[edit]
At the time of sustained European contact in the 17th and 19th centuries, the Lenape were a powerful Native American nation who inhabited a region on the mid-Atlantic coast spanning the latitudes of southern Massachusetts to the southern extent of Delaware in what anthropologists call the Northeastern Woodlands.[53] Although never politically unified, the confederation of the Lenape roughly encompassed the area around and between the Delaware and lower Hudson rivers, and included the western part of Long Island in present-day New York.[54] Some of their place names, such as Manhattan ("the island of many hills"[55]), Raritan, and Tappan were adopted by Dutch and English colonists to identify the Lenape people that lived there.
Contemporary tribes and organizations[edit]
U.S. federally recognized tribes[edit]
Three Lenape tribes are federally recognized in the United States: