The Lenape: The First People of the St. Paul's Church Area

A Lenape village fishing with weirs, much as the Lenape did near St. Paul's.

Before European colonists arrived in the 1600s, the land around St. Paul's Church was home to bands of the Lenape, or Delaware, who spoke an Algonquian language.

• Names: they're often wrongly called "Siwanoy," a name they almost certainly never used; scholars also call them "Munsee," after their dialect. Like other native peoples, they tended to name themselves by their villages.
• Deep roots: they had lived here at least 1,000 years, probably far longer; people have lived in the Northeast for at least 12,000 years. In the 1600s they clustered along Long Island Sound and its rivers from Westchester to the Bronx.

Village life

• Homes: villages of several wigwams — round or oval bark houses with a smoke hole; some were up to 60 feet long and held several families.
• Food: shellfish above all — mussels, clams and oysters dug daily. Large stone-weighted nets across stream mouths caught spawning alewives, shad and sturgeon each spring. Hunters took deer and elk with sharp triangular stone arrowheads, and deerskin made most clothing. Several times a year they burned woods to keep up meadows for game.
• Wampum: shell beads made into belts, highly valued.
• Farming: women grew corn, beans and squash and gathered nuts and berries. With descent traced through the female line, women were highly respected.

Leadership and land

• A sakima (compare sachem) led, but by persuasion, not force: handling ceremonies, minor disputes and relations with other tribes — and later Europeans — while villagers could reject or reverse decisions. In war, war captains temporarily took over, even negotiating peace.
• Land belonged to the village: it could be assigned to a family, reassigned, and used by others, but private ownership was unknown to them — a source of deep misunderstanding with the Dutch and other settlers.

Dispersal

European settlement in the 17th and 18th centuries devastated Lenape life:

• Disease: thousands died of smallpox and other epidemics, lacking immunity.
• The fur trade: metal pots, knives, axes and arrowheads traded for beaver pelts displaced traditional crafts and made the Lenape dependent on traders who often exploited them; competition for furs brought wars between bands.
• Land loss: fraudulent deals and clashing ideas of property cost them large tracts; settlers' livestock, clearing and farms destroyed hunting grounds and food sources.

By the late 1600s and early 1700s, once-thriving villages were broken. Most bands moved west to the Susquehanna and Ohio valleys, joining other displaced peoples. After the Revolution, descendants of New York's Lenape scattered: some to Ontario, where descendants remain; some across the Plains to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) by the late 1860s; others to the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation in Wisconsin.

Revival

Traditions faded but never died. In the late 20th century, Lenape descendants and historians held conferences to study and revive the language and traditions. Touching Leaves Woman, an Oklahoma Lenape elder and one of the last fluent speakers, worked with historians and linguists to record them and traveled to Lenape communities to spark a revival. In the 1980s and ’90s descendants visited New York to see their ancestors' land; annual powwows sustain tribal identity; and exhibitions have told the public the story of the area's first people.

Sources

Based on "The Lenape: Native inhabitants of the St. Paul's area," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.