The Lenni Lenape, or Delaware Indians

by Edwin Robert Walker

For more than forty years after the founding of Pennsylvania there was not a murder of a settler committed by an Indian. And General William H. Harrison wrote that a long and intimate knowledge of the Delawares, in peace and war, as friends and enemies, had left upon his mind the most favorable impressions of their character for bravery, generosity, and fidelity to their engagements.

The religious beliefs of the Delawares resembled closely those of the other Indian nations. They were the worship of Light, especially in its concrete manifestations of fire and sun; of the four winds, as the rain bringers; and of the Totemic animals. The idea of a bad spirit, a devil, appears to have been wholly unknown to the Indians until instilled into their minds by the whites, as already remarked. They had a general belief in the soul or spiritual part of man. Their doctrine was that after death the soul went South where it would enjoy a happy life for a certain time and would then return and be born again into the world.

An important class among the Indians were those who were by the whites called “medicine men,” who were really the native priests. They were of two schools, one devoting themselves to divination, the other to healing. The title of the former among the Delawares was “powwow,” meaning dreamer. They claimed the power of dreaming truthfully of the future, and were the interpreters of the dreams of others. Of course they were fakirs, though palpably so only to themselves and not at all to their followers. The other school of the priestly class was called “medeu,” meaning conjurer. Some of them professed great austerity of life, had no fixed abode, exorcised sickness and officiated at funeral rites.

When the white settlers first came to New Jersey the Lenape had not reached the stage of progress where the office of priest had been separated from that of physician. Nor was the “profession” at all exclusive. Anyone was eligible to enter it. The Lenape were tolerant of the religious beliefs of others, although some of the medicine men tried to incite their dupes to massacre certain missionaries. The Grand Council of the Delawares in 1775 decreed religious liberty.

When the missionaries came among the Indians these shrewd and able medicine men, “powwow” and “medeu,” accustomed to practice upon the credulity of the unsuspecting red-skin, foresaw that the new faith would destroy their power and incidentally curtail their revenues, and therefore they vigorously attacked the gospel teachings, and often the self-sacrificing missionaries to the Indians were compelled to complain of the evil influence exerted by these false prophets upon the aborigines.

The principal sacred ceremony of the Indians was the dance and accompanying song. This was called the “kanti kanti,” meaning to sing. From this noisy rite the white settlers coined the word “cantico,” which still survives and is a word with us.

The early English occupants of America gave little attention to the Indian language beyond an acquisition of what was indispensable to trading with the natives. Dr. Brinton declares that William Penn professed to have acquired a mastery of it, but says that from the specimens Penn gives it is evident that all he studied was the traders’ jargon, which was about a near pure Lenape as pigeon English is to Macaulay’s periods.

In the Lenape language, which contains two slightly different dialects, all words are derived from simple monosyllabic roots, by means of affixes and suffixes, and they do not come within our grammatical category as nouns, adjectives, verbs and other parts of speech, but are indifferent themes, and to this there appear to be few exceptions. The genius of the language is holophrastic, that is, its effort is to express the relationship of several ideas by combining them in one word. This is an example: “popochpoalimawoawoll” (po-poch-po-al-i-ma-wo-a-woll), meaning “they beat them” and “wunshillawoawoll” (wun-shill-a-wo-woll), meaning “they killed them.”

During the War of the Revolution the Delawares were first neutral and then partisans of the Americans and thus prevented attack by hostile Indians on the Jersey towns and settlements.

The Delawares were passionately fond of their ancestral traditions and their forefathers, and cherished the belief that they were the wisest and bravest of men. They loved to rehearse their genealogies. They were so skilled at it that they could repeat the chief and collateral lines with the utmost readiness.