Lenni-Lenape Resources
This page brings together various resources for and about the Lenni-Lenape peoples, including links to tribal governments, scholarly books in the Rowan University Libraries, and search strategies for finding more resources. The resources listed on this page should not be seen as comprehensive, but rather a starting point for further research.
Lenni-Lenape Land Acknowledgment
The land upon which Rowan University is situated is part of the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape, called “Lenapehoking.” The Lenape People lived in harmony with one another upon this territory for thousands of years. During the colonial era and early federal period, many were removed west and north, but some also remain among the continuing historical tribal communities of the region: The Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation; the Ramapough Lenape Nation; and the Powhatan Renape Nation, The Nanticoke of Millsboro Delaware, and the Lenape of Cheswold Delaware. We acknowledge the Lenni-Lenape as the original people of this land and their continuing relationship with their territory. In our acknowledgment of the continued presence of Lenape people in their homeland, we affirm the aspiration of the great Lenape Chief Tamanend, that there be harmony between the indigenous people of this land and the descendants of the immigrants to this land, “as long as the rivers and creeks flow, and the sun, moon, and stars shine.
- Adapted from the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation
Tribal Governments
The Lenape people include several federally recognized tribes in the United States and First Nations in Canada. They comprise:
- Munsee-Delaware Nation, St. Thomas, Ontario
State-recognized tribes include:
Unrecognized Tribes of Lenape also exist in many states, including Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Idaho, and Kansas.
Search Strategies
Lenape Peoples
The Lenni-Lenape people have been referred to by multiple names in their history, so consider searching a variety of the names when searching for information. These include:
- Lenape
- Lenni-Lenape
- Leni-Lenape
- Delaware Tribe
- Munsee (a subtribe of the Lenape, one dialect of the Lenape language)
- Unami (another dialect of the Lenape language)
The Library of Congress Subject Headings use a controlled vocabulary, and consistently refer to the Lenape peoples as "Delaware Indians", which can be searched in Library Search or WorldCat.
Language Family
In addition, the Lenni-Lenape belong to the Algonquian language family, and share many cultural traits with other Algonquin peoples. You may want to search for general information about Algonquian peoples.
Geography
Though Lenapehoking is the traditional homeland of the Lenni-Lenape, members of the tribe have been forced to relocate many times in their history, settling in various places and organized as various individual tribes (see the list above). You may want to consider searching with geographic terms to specify which tribe you are interested in. You may also want to search in geographically-oriented publications, such as the following for New Jersey:
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian has digitized and provided access to many objects and archival documents created by the Lenape, or about the Lenape. These include baskets, utensils, clothing, artwork, and treaties.
Original Treaty with the United States
The Lenape were the first native peoples to sign a treaty with the government of the United States, in 1778. You can view the original treaty through the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
Scholarly Monographs in Rowan University Libraries
Writings from the colonial period to the present by non-Native writers often contain inaccurate and problematic descriptions of Native American cultures. Be cautious when reading these sources, and interrogate the source of the information presented and its proximity to Native sources.
Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians by
Seventeenth-century Indians from the Delaware and lower Hudson valleys organized their lives around small-scale groupings of kin and communities. Living through epidemics, warfare, economic change, and physical dispossession, survivors from these peoples came together in new locations, especially the eighteenth-century Susquehanna and Ohio River valleys. In the process, they did not abandon kin and community orientations, but they increasingly defined a role for themselves as Delaware Indians in early American society. Peoples of the River Valleys offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley. It focuses on a broad and significant period: 1609-1783, including the years of Dutch, Swedish, and English colonization and the American Revolution. An epilogue takes the Delawares' story into the mid-nineteenth century. Amy C. Schutt examines important themes in Native American history--mediation and alliance formation--and shows their crucial role in the development of the Delawares as a people. She goes beyond familiar questions about Indian-European relations and examines how Indian-Indian associations were a major factor in the history of the Delawares. Drawing extensively upon primary sources, including treaty minutes, deeds, and Moravian mission records, Schutt reveals that Delawares approached alliances as a tool for survival at a time when Euro-Americans were encroaching on Native lands. As relations with colonists were frequently troubled, Delawares often turned instead to form alliances with other Delawares and non-Delaware Indians with whom they shared territories and resources. In vivid detail, Peoples of the River Valleys shows the link between the Delawares' approaches to land and the relationships they constructed on the land.
Call Number: Available ONLINEISBN: 9780812203790Publication Date: 2013-03-01
On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory by
Bridging the fields of indigenous, early American, memory, and media studies, On Records illuminates the problems of communication between cultures and across generations. Andrew Newman examines several controversial episodes in the historical narrative of the Delaware (Lenape) Indians, including the stories of their primordial migration to settle a homeland spanning the Delaware and Hudson Rivers, the arrival of the Dutch and the first colonial land fraud, William Penn's founding of Pennsylvania with a Great Treaty of Peace, and the "infamous" 1737 Pennsylvania Walking Purchase. As Newman demonstrates, the quest for ideal records--authentic, authoritative, and objective, anchored in the past yet intelligible to the present--has haunted historical actors and scholars alike. Yet without "proof," how can we know what really happened? On Records articulates surprising connections among colonial documents, recorded oral traditions, and material and visual cultures. Its comprehensive, probing analysis of historical evidence yields a multifaceted understanding of events and reveals new insights into the divergent memories of a shared past.
Call Number: Available ONLINEISBN: 9780803239869Publication Date: 2012-12-01
A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware Indians by
"A Nation of Women" chronicles changing ideas of gender and identity among the Delaware Indians from the mid-seventeenth through the eighteenth century, as they encountered various waves of migrating peoples in their homelands along the eastern coast of North America. In Delaware society at the beginning of this period, to be a woman meant to engage in the activities performed by women, including diplomacy, rather than to be defined by biological sex. Among the Delaware, being a "woman" was therefore a self-identification, employed by both women and men, that reflected the complementary roles of both sexes within Delaware society. For these reasons, the Delaware were known among Europeans and other Native American groups as "a nation of women." Decades of interaction with these other cultures gradually eroded the positive connotations of being a nation of women as well as the importance of actual women in Delaware society. In Anglo-Indian politics, being depicted as a woman suggested weakness and evil. Exposed to such thinking, Delaware men struggled successfully to assume the formal speaking roles and political authority that women once held. To salvage some sense of gender complementarity in Delaware society, men and women redrew the lines of their duties more rigidly. As the era came to a close, even as some Delaware engaged in a renewal of Delaware identity as a masculine nation, others rejected involvement in Christian networks that threatened to disturb the already precarious gender balance in their social relations. Drawing on all available European accounts, including those in Swedish, German, and English, Fur establishes the centrality of gender in Delaware life and, in doing so, argues for a new understanding of how different notions of gender influenced all interactions in colonial North America.
Call Number: Available ONLINEISBN: 1283890569Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn by
In 1631, when the Dutch tried to develop plantation agriculture in the Delaware Valley, the Lenape Indians destroyed the colony of Swanendael and killed its residents. The Natives and Dutch quickly negotiated peace, avoiding an extended war through diplomacy and trade. The Lenapes preserved their political sovereignty for the next fifty years as Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English colonists settled the Delaware Valley. The European outposts did not approach the size and strength of those in Virginia, New England, and New Netherland. Even after thousands of Quakers arrived in West New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the late 1670s and '80s, the region successfully avoided war for another seventy-five years. Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of the multiethnic society of the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After Swanendael, the Natives, Swedes, and Finns avoided war by focusing on trade and forging strategic alliances in such events as the Dutch conquest, the Mercurius affair, the Long Swede conspiracy, and English attempts to seize land. Drawing on a wide range of sources, author Jean R. Soderlund demonstrates that the hallmarks of Delaware Valley society--commitment to personal freedom, religious liberty, peaceful resolution of conflict, and opposition to hierarchical government--began in the Delaware Valley not with Quaker ideals or the leadership of William Penn but with the Lenape Indians, whose culture played a key role in shaping Delaware Valley society. The first comprehensive account of the Lenape Indians and their encounters with European settlers before Pennsylvania's founding, Lenape Country places Native culture at the center of this part of North America.
Call Number: Available ONLINEISBN: 0812290194Publication Date: 2014-10-21
Mythology of the Lenape by
The Lenape, or Delaware, are an Eastern Algonquian people who originally lived in what is now the greater New York and Philadelphia metropolitan region and have since been dispersed across North America. While the Lenape have long attracted the attention of historians, ethnographers, and linguists, their oral literature has remained unexamined, and Lenape stories have been scattered and largely unpublished. This catalog of Lenape mythology, featuring synopses of all known Lenape tales, was assembled by folklorist John Bierhorst from historical sources and from material collected by linguists and ethnographers--a difficult task in light of both the paucity of research done on Lenape mythology and the fragmentation of traditional Lenape culture over the past three centuries.Bierhorst here offers an unprecedented guide to the Lenape corpus with supporting texts. Part one of the "Guide" presents a thematic summary of the folkloric tale types and motifs found throughout the texts; part two presents a synopsis of each of the 218 Lenape narratives on record; part three lists stories of uncertain origin; and part four compares types and motifs occurring in Lenape myths with those found in myths of neighboring Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures. In the "Texts" section of the book, Bierhorst presents previously unpublished stories collected in the early twentieth century by ethnographers M. R. Harrington and Truman Michelson. Included are two versions of the Lenape trickster cycle, narratives accounting for dance origins, Lenape views of Europeans, and tales of such traditional figures as Mother Corn and the little man of the woods called Wemategunis.By gathering every available example of Lenape mythology, Bierhorst has produced a work that will long stand as a definitive reference. Perhaps more important, it restores to the land in which the Lenape once thrived a long-missing piece of its Native literary heritage.
Call Number: Available ONLINEISBN: 0816515239Publication Date: 1995-10-01
The Western Delaware Indian Nation, 1730-1795 by
During the early eighteenth century, three phratries or tribes (Turtle, Turkey, and Wolf) of Delaware Indians left their traditional homeland in the Delaware River watershed and moved west to the Allegheny Valley of western Pennsylvania and eventually across the Ohio River into the Muskingum River valley. As newcomers to the colonial American borderlands, these bands of Delawares detached themselves from their past in the east, developed a sense of common cause, and created for themselves a new regional identity in western Pennsylvania. The Western Delaware Indian Nation, 1730-1795: Warriors and Diplomats is a case study of the western Delaware Indian experience, offering critical insight into the dynamics of Native American migrations to new environments and the process of reconstructing social and political systems to adjust to new circumstances. The Ohio backcountry brought to center stage the masculine activities of hunting, trade, war-making, diplomacy and was instrumental in the transformation of Delaware society and with that change, the advance of a western Delaware nation. This nation, however, was forged in a time of insecurity as it faced the turmoil of imperial conflict during the Seven Years' War and the backcountry racial violence brought about by the American Revolution. The stress of factionalism in the council house among Delaware leaders such as Tamaqua, White Eyes, Killbuck, and Captain Pipe constantly undermined the stability of a lasting political western Delaware nation. This narrative of western Delaware nationhood is a story of the fight for independence and regional unity and the futile effort to create and maintain an enduring nation. In the end the western Delaware nation became fragmented and forced as in the past, to journey west in search of a new beginning. The Western Delaware Indian Nation, 1730-1795: Warriors and Diplomats is an account of an Indian people and their dramatic and arduous struggle for autonomy, identity, political union, and a permanent homeland.
Call Number: Available ONLINEISBN: 161146224XPublication Date: 2017-10-16
Legends of the Delaware Indians and Picture Writing by
This collection of authentic Delaware legends is an affirmation of cultural values. The stories portray moral values and are translated from (and to) the Delaware language. The book was originally published in 1905.
Call Number: E99.D2 A3 1997ISBN: 0815604874Publication Date: 1997-11-01
Voices from the Delaware Big House Ceremony by
Voices from the Delaware Big House Ceremony examines and celebrates the Big House ceremony, the most important Delaware Indian religious observance to be documented historically. Edited by Robert S. Grumet, this compilation of essays offers diverse perspectives, from both historical documents and contemporary accounts, which shed light on the ceremony and its role in Delaware culture. As Grumet says, "The many voices brought together in this book produce something more akin to a chorus than a chant." The annual fall festival known as the "Gamwing" (Big House) was the center of life for Delaware Indian communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana west to Ontario and Oklahoma. The last ceremony was performed by the Eastern Oklahoma Delaware community in 1924. Determined to preserve their traditions for future generations, Delaware Big House followers have worked with anthropologists to preserve Big House texts, rituals, songs, and sacred objects. Including commentaries by Delaware traditionalists from communities in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario, where most descendants of the Big House Church live today, the volume also features an ethnographic description of the Big House ceremony and historical accounts dating from 1655 to 1984. Voices from the Delaware Big House Ceremony contributors and consultants are John Bierhorst, Ruthe Blalock Jones, Marlene Molly Miller, Michael Pace, Bruce L. Pearson, Terry J. Prewitt, James A. Rementer, and Darryl Stonefish.
Call Number: E99.D2 V65 2001ISBN: 9780806133607Publication Date: 2002-02-15- The Delaware Indians: A History byCall Number: E99.D2 W39ISBN: 0813507022Publication Date: 1972-06-01
- The Lenape: Archaeology, History and Ethnology byCall Number: F131 E99.D2ISBN: 9780911020205Publication Date: 1987-01-01
Primary Sources: Oral Histories
Oral histories are important sources of history and narrative in many Native American cultures and traditions. These examples bring to the forefront Indigenous perspectives and traditions.
Long Journey Home: Oral Histories of Contemporary Delaware Indians by
Through first-person accounts, Long Journey Home presents the stories of the Lenape, also known as the Delaware Tribe. These oral histories, which span the post-Civil War era to the present, are gathered into four sections and tell of personal and tribal events as they unfold over time and place. The history of the Lenape is one of forced displacement, from their original tribal home along the eastern seaboard into Pennsylvania, continuing with a series of displacements in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and the Indian Territory. For the group of Lenape interviewed for this book, home is now the area around Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The stories of their long journey have been handed down and remain part of the tribe's collective memory and bring an unforgettable immediacy to the tale of the Lenape. Above all they make clear that the history of seven generations remains very much alive.
Call Number: E99.D2 L66 2008ISBN: 0253349680Publication Date: 2007-12-24
The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival by
"Grandchildren meet their grandparents at the end," Denise Low says, "as tragic figures. We remember their decline and deaths. . . . The story we see as grandchildren is like a garden covered by snow, just outlines visible." Low brings to light deeply held secrets of Native ancestry as she recovers the life story of her Kansas grandfather, Frank Bruner (1889-1963). She remembers her childhood in Kansas, where her grandparents remained at a distance, personally and physically, from their grandchildren, despite living only a few miles away. As an adult, she comes to understand her grandfather's Delaware (Lenape) legacy of persecution and heroic survival in the southern plains of the early 1900s, where the Ku Klux Klan attacked Native people along with other ethnic minorities. As a result of such experiences, the Bruner family fled to Kansas City and suppressed their non-European ancestry as completely as possible. As Low unravels this hidden family history of the Lenape diaspora, she discovers the lasting impact of trauma and substance abuse, the deep sense of loss and shame related to suppressed family emotions, and the power of collective memory. Low traveled extensively around Kansas, tracking family history until she understood her grandfather's political activism and his healing heritage of connections to the land. In this moving exploration of her grandfather's life, the former poet laureate of Kansas evokes the beauty of the Flint Hills grasslands, the hardships her grandfather endured, and the continued discovery of his teachings.
Call Number: Available ONLINEISBN: 9780803294936Publication Date: 2017-01-01
