Lenape

The Lenape (/ləˈnɑːpi/) are Native American people in Canada and the United States. They are also called Delaware Indians after their historic territory along the Delaware River. As a result of disruption following the American Revolutionary War and later Indian removals from the eastern United States, the main groups now live in Ontario (Canada), Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. In Canada, they are enrolled in the Munsee-Delaware Nation 1, the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and the Delaware of Six Nations. In the United States, they are enrolled in three federally recognized tribes, that is, the Delaware Nation and the Delaware Tribe of Indians, both located in Oklahoma, and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, located in Wisconsin. The Ramapough Mountain Indians and the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape identify as Lenape descendants and are recognized as tribes by the state of New Jersey.

At the time of European contact in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Lenape inhabited a region on the mid-Atlantic coast in what anthropologists call the Northeastern Woodlands. Although never politically unified, it is frequently referred to as Lenapehoking ("Lenape country"). It roughly comprised the area around and between the Delaware and lower Hudson rivers, and included the western part of Long Island in present-day New York. Lenapehoking hosted over two dozen Lenape polities. Some of their place names, such as Manhattan, Raritan, and Tappan were adopted by Dutch and English colonists to identify them. Based on the historical record of the mid-seventeenth century, it has been estimated that most Lenape polities consisted of several hundred people. It is conceivable that some had been considerably larger prior to contact. Even regions at a distance from European settlement, such as Iroquoia in upstate New York and central Pennsylvania, had been devastated by smallpox by the 1640s.

Most modern Lenape are native English speakers. In the seventeenth century, the Lenape spoke three closely related dialects: Unami, Munsee and Unalachtigo, which are collectively known as the Delaware languages. They have been classified by linguists as belonging to the Eastern Algonquian language group. The term "Algonquian" is occasionally used as a shorthand for people who spoke languages of this group, but the distinct peoples in this large language family had otherwise little in common. Due to aggressive European expansion and the resulting migrations, population losses, and political reorganization, Lenape languages had converged by the mid-eighteenth century. Unami and Munsee were now the most dominant. Another hundred years of forced migrations left the languages vulnerable. They hardly survived the U.S. Indian policies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Various people made efforts to revive or at least document Unami and Munsee in the late twentieth century.

The Lenape kinship system was traditionally organized by clans determined by matrilineal descent. That is, children were considered to belong to the mother's clan, where they gained their social status and identity. The mother's eldest brother was more significant as a mentor to the boy children than was their father, who was of another clan. Hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line, and women elders could remove leaders of whom they disapproved. Traditionally, the Lenape had no concept of landed property. But clans had use rights. Agricultural land was managed by women and allotted according to the subsistence needs of their extended families. Matrilocal residence further enhanced the position of women in society. A young married couple would live with the woman's family, where her mother and sisters could also assist her with her growing family.

At the time of European contact, the Lenape practiced agriculture, mostly companion planting. The women cultivated many varieties of the "Three Sisters:" corn, beans and squash. The men also practiced hunting and the harvesting of seafood. The people were primarily sedentary rather than nomadic; they moved to seasonal campsites for particular purposes such as fishing and hunting. European settlers and traders from the seventeenth-century colonies of New Netherland and New Sweden traded with the Lenape for agricultural products, mainly maize, in exchange for iron tools. Lenapes also arranged contacts between Minquas or Northern Iroquoians and the Dutch and Swedish West India companies to promote the fur trade. The Lenape were major producers of 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 sore in the late 1620s and early 1630s, but were relatively peaceful most of the time.

Most Lenape were pushed out of their homeland by expanding European colonies during the eighteenth century. Lenape polities were weakened by newly introduced diseases, mainly smallpox, and European violence. Iroquoian polities occasionally contributed to the process. The surviving Lenape reorganized their polities and moved west into the upper Ohio River basin. The American Revolutionary War and U.S. independence pushed them further west. In the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Oklahoma Territory under Indian removal policy. In the 21st century, most Lenape now reside in the U.S. state of Oklahoma, with some communities living also in Kansas, Wisconsin, Ontario (Canada), and in their traditional homelands.