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Delaware Tribe, Leni Lenapes

FAQ's:http://delawaretribe.org/culture-and-language/

 

 

By BARBARA J. ISENBERG
Bucks County Courier Times
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“The Delaware Indians did not call themselves Delaware, of course, so I set out to find out what they called themselves,” Becker said. “I found out that there were four completely different cultures there, all called Delaware by amateur historians.”

Those four tribes are the Lenape, the Munsee to the north, the Ciconicon to the south and the Lenopi in New Jersey. The Lenape, Becker explained, were fishers.

“Their survival depended on the andronomous fish like shad and herring that come from the ocean to spawn in fresh water streams,” he said. “You could really live well nine to 10 months of the year doing nothing but fishing.”

The Lenape tribe is one of the easiest tribes to identify and study because of William Penn's land purchases from the tribe, but the Lenape had been doing business with foreign settlers before Penn came along. The Swedes and the Dutch were buying land from the Lenape in bits and pieces in the mid-17th century.

That changed when William Penn started buying large tracts of land from the Lenape.