Mondo's NAT #289

Native American Tribes series.

Lenape

Lenape means "Human Beings" or the "Real People" in the Unami language. The first recorded contact with Europeans and 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.

The early interaction between the Lenape and Dutch traders in the 17th century was primarily through the fur trade, specifically, the Lenape trapped and traded beaver pelts for European-made goods. According to Dutch settler Isaac de Rasieres, who observed the Lenape in 1628, the Lenape's primary crop was maize, which they planted in March. They quickly adopted European metal tools for this task.

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.