Lenape Erotic

The Lenape are the people whose name for themselves is usually translated as the original people, and whose homeland, Lenapehoking, lies under what is now New York City, Philadelphia, and nearly all of New Jersey. That geography shaped everything: they were the first nation the Dutch, Swedes, and English met on that coast, the sellers in the Manhattan transaction of 1626, and the people William Penn treated with at Shackamaxon. Other Algonquian nations called them grandfather, a mark of seniority in council that still carries weight. Yet most Lenape today live nowhere near the Delaware River. Their nations sit in Bartlesville and Anadarko in Oklahoma, at Bowler in Wisconsin, and along the Thames River in southwestern Ontario, end points of a westward push that began with the fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737 and ran through the Ohio country, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas.

Two languages, Munsee in the north and Unami in the south, mark the historic division inside the nation. Both are Eastern Algonquian, close cousins of Mahican, and both are in intensive revival. Unami lost its last first-language speaker in 2002. Munsee holds on with a few elderly speakers at Moraviantown, and both are taught through community classes and an online talking dictionary. Descent runs through the mother, and everyone belongs to one of three clans, Wolf, Turtle, or Turkey, which once governed marriage, hospitality, and seating in council. Traditional religion centered on a Creator and on the Big House, a twelve-night autumn thanksgiving held in a purpose-built longhouse with carved faces on the center post. The last full ceremony took place in Oklahoma in 1924. Mesingw, the masked keeper of the game animals, remains a living figure, and his half-red, half-black face still appears on tribal emblems and regalia. Christianity runs deep among the Lenape, a legacy of the Moravian missions of the eighteenth century, which makes the massacre of ninety-six pacifist converts at Gnadenhutten in 1782 all the more bitter: the militia killed people who had already accepted the church. The Delaware were also the first Native nation to sign a treaty with the United States, at Fort Pitt in 1778, a document that floated a Delaware state with a seat in Congress and then went nowhere. Their modern politics is a quieter version of that argument over standing. The Delaware Tribe of Indians spent decades getting its federal recognition untangled from the Cherokee Nation, while state-recognized communities in New Jersey, such as the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and the Ramapough, keep a presence in the old homeland that Washington does not yet formally see.