DELAWARE INDIANS

DELAWARE INDIANS, Native Americans who call themselves Lenape are the largest native group to survive from the mid-Atlantic region, primarily because they neither fought a major war nor fell victim to slave raids. Moreover, they held an annual rite of thanksgiving called the gamwing (big house rite), which provided a cultural focus that sustained them through continual adversity. Their aboriginal lifeline was the river named for them that has branch drainages covering New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and adjoining sections of New York, Connecticut, and Delaware.

The Delawares' traditional culture was based in the village with farm fields and hunting territories within a watershed. Kinship was traced through the mother, and eachlocal segment of a matrilineal clan belonged to one of three overarching units (a phratry) whose emblems were the Wolf, Turtle, and Turkey. Their economy mixed fishing and maize farming with hunting. The two largest political divisions that survived into the twenty-first century are the Monsi of the northern homeland and the Unami of the south. Survivors of coastal groups were briefly known as Unalachtigo.

While the Spanish, Swedes, Germans, English, and French all had contact with the Delawares, the religious influences of the Quakers and Moravians had the greatest impact. Some Delawares converted, but those religions also became foils for prophets periodically revitalizing their lifeways. John "Moonhead" Wilson continued this tradition into the 1900s as he simultaneously advocated Catholicism, the Ghost Dance, and the beginnings of the Native American Church (peyotism).

Forced into Ohio, the Delawares divided by 1800. Most Monsi moved into Ontario. The Unami continued to Indiana, where they went through a major religious revival, then to Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, where they were forced to join the Cherokee Nation in 1867. The splinter "western" Delawares, who had allied with Caddos in Texas, were forced into Oklahoma in 1859. In 1996 the Delaware majority, with ten thousand enrollees, returned to sovereign status, though the Cherokees continued to oppose them in federal court.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goddard, Ives. "Delaware." In Handbook of North American Indians. Edited by William C. Sturtevant et al. Vol. 15: Northeast, edited by Bruce Trigger. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.

Miller, Jay. "The Delaware as Women: A Symbolic Solution." American Ethnologist 1, no. 3 (1974): 507–514.

———. "The 1806 Purge among the Indiana Delaware: Sorcery, Gender, Boundaries, and Legitimacy." Ethnohistory 41, no. 2 (1994): 245–266.

JayMiller

See alsoCherokee ; Indian Religious Life ; Indian Removal .

Delaware Indians, confederacy of Algonquian tribes, were given their present name by colonists who found them in the Delaware River valley, but their own name is Leni‐Lenape. Their early history and migration to North America are told in their tribal chronicle, the Walam Olum. In 1682 they made their famous treaty with Penn, which they retained for 50 years. Defeated by the Iroquois (1720), they moved into Ohio, where they sided with the French in the French and Indian War, and against the Americans in the uprising of Pontiac and the Revolution. The whites attacked a peaceful Delaware settlement in 1782, causing the remainder of these Christian Indians to flee to Ontario. Others ceded their lands to the U.S. and moved to Oklahoma. The Delaware figure as noble, wise, and just in the Leather‐Stocking Tales, and appear also in Freneau's Prophecy of King Tammany, Brown's Edgar Huntly, Paulding's Koningsmarke, Nicholas Hentz's Tadeuskund, and outside of literature, in studies by Rafinesque, E.G. Squier, and D.G. Brinton. They are mentioned in Irving's Tour of the Prairies, but the most comprehensive early account of them was in Schoolcraft's six‐volume History, Conditions, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes in the United States (1851–57), used as a source by Thoreau and Longfellow. A fictional view of them in modern life occurs in The Light in the Forest (1953) by Conrad Richter.

Delaware Confederation of Algonquian-speaking Native Americans. The main members were the Unami, Munsee and Unalachtigo, who occupied territory from Long Island to Pennsylvania and Delaware. Under pressure from settlers and the Iroquois Confederacy, they migrated to the Ohio region in the 18th century. They lost these lands by a treaty of 1795, and subsequently became widely scattered.

http://www.delaware.gov

Delaware An Algonquian-speaking tribe of Native Americans whose original homelands lay along the Atlantic coast where they cultivated maize. They traded with the first European arrivals in the 17th century but were eventually driven off their lands as more colonists arrived. During the 19th century they moved to Kansas and Oklahoma and today others live in Wisconsin and Ontario.