Lenape

The Lenape are an Algonquian-speaking people whose homeland, Lenapehoking, stretched across New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware and the lower Hudson Valley, including the site of New York City. English colonists called them the Delaware, after the river they had named for Lord De La Warr, and the name Lenni Lenape is also used. Driven west over nearly two centuries, they now live mainly in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario.

When Europeans arrived, the Lenape were a web of related communities linked by kinship and two close languages, Unami and Munsee. Society was matrilineal: children belonged to their mother's clan, Wolf, Turtle or Turkey, and husbands traditionally moved into their wives' households. Sachems led villages but answered to their people and to councils of elders. Women grew maize, beans and squash, while men hunted deer and other game, fished and gathered shellfish from the coastal bays. Scholars estimate that perhaps 15,000 Lenape lived in about 80 settlements in and around what is now New York City. Lenape communities were also major makers of wampum, shell beads used in ritual and later in trade.

In 1524 Lenape in canoes greeted Giovanni da Verrazzano in New York Bay. In the following century they traded maize and wampum with the colonies of New Netherland and New Sweden for metal tools. Rivals armed by Dutch traders, including the Susquehannock and the Haudenosaunee, gained the upper hand, and the Haudenosaunee counted the Lenape as tributaries from 1676 to 1753. Smallpox, measles and other new diseases, as well as wars such as Kieft's War of 1643 to 1645, cut their numbers sharply. In 1682 William Penn made a peace treaty with the Lenape on founding Pennsylvania, but some 20,000 settlers arrived in the following decades.

After Penn's death his sons revived an old, unsigned deed from the 1680s, and in what the historian Steven C. Harper describes as a "convoluted sequence of deception, fraud, and extortion", the 1737 Walking Purchase drove the remaining Lenape from the Delaware valley. Many moved to the upper Ohio valley. Some sided with France in the French and Indian War and later joined Pontiac's War, while others were drawn into Moravian Christian missions. During the American Revolution the Lenape were divided: the 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt with the United States briefly raised hopes of a Native state in Ohio, but after many Lenape at Coshocton joined the war against the Americans, an expedition from Fort Pitt laid the town waste. Munsee-speaking Lenape who had sided with Britain moved to what is now Ontario, settling at Moraviantown in 1792.

Treaties in 1795 and 1818 surrendered Ohio and Indiana lands, and Lenape bands moved to Missouri, then to a reservation in Kansas granted in 1829. Other bands went to Texas around 1820, sharing land with the Caddo; Lenape scouts later served the Texas Republic and guided American expeditions until the last were removed in 1859. Settler encroachment in Kansas led the main body to Indian Territory in the 1860s, where they had to buy land within the Cherokee Nation. A 1979 decision counted them as Cherokee; separate recognition, restored in 1996, was lost in a 2004 court ruling and regained in 2009.

Three federally recognised tribes exist in the United States: the Delaware Nation at Anadarko and the Delaware Tribe of Indians at Bartlesville, both in Oklahoma, and the Stockbridge–Munsee Community in Wisconsin. In Ontario, Canada recognises the Munsee-Delaware Nation, the Moravian of the Thames First Nation and the Delaware of Six Nations. In 2023 only a few elders at Moraviantown spoke Munsee fluently, and the Delaware Tribe has digitised Southern Unami in the Lenape Talking Dictionary. The federally recognised tribes reject the claims of a number of state-recognised and unrecognised groups in the eastern states that say they descend from the Lenape.

Our 1500, 1530 and 1600 maps draw an approximate Lenape territory under the label Delaware, the colonial-era name. On the 1500 map the Wyandot homeland, labelled Huron, is also drawn; the outlines are approximate.