The Lenape: the Fish People of the Delaware Valley

Shad are a spawning fish that run (or once ran) the Delaware River and it's tributaries.

 

by douglas reeser
April 25, 2021

For the entire decade of the 1990s I was living down by the river on the Schuylkill in the farm country a bit outside of Philadelphia. For many years I lived in a dilapidated trailer with water from a hose and a dangerously old wood stove for heat. There were times that I simply slept in my old VW bus. It was the decade of my 20s, and I did my fair share of experimentation and exploration. It was in those years that I first thought seriously about my own life, and developed an interest in the wider world around me. I planted my first gardens, I studied herbalism and mysticism, I became vegetarian, I spent countless hours in nature, in the woods and in canoes and kayaks on the river. It was during these years that I learned I was living on Lenape land. 

Walking around the fields along the river, I would often find arrowheads and other assorted artifacts in the freshly tilled soil. On those days as I walked slowly, scanning the soil for stones made into tools, I would ponder the lives of the people who once lived there before the Europeans invaded. I learned that the Lenape are an indigenous group that lived on the lands around the Delaware River valley, including parts of Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. Having lived on some of those lands, often close to nature and with little income, I developed a great respect for those people who were there long before me. 

In the early 2000s, I decided to shift gears in life, and I returned to school as an older undergraduate student. My interest in the Lenape and other ancient cultures around the world first led me to the study of archaeology. I worked on a few archaeological digs, including on a Lenape site on an island in the middle of the Delaware River. My first research paper, based on trips to a few libraries in historical societies in the Philadelphia area, was on the Lenape on the Schuylkill River, a major tributary of the Delaware. One of my professors was near-retirement and from the old guard of academia. His office was the once-typical room in disarray, stuffed from floor to ceiling with shelves, boxes, and stacks of books and papers, such that you could hardly walk in the room and get to his desk. Somehow, it was his work in organized chaos. One of his primary research interests: the Lenape. 

I spent a good deal of my last few semesters of my undergraduate degree alone in the basement lab, tracing and categorizing pottery shards from nearby colonial sites. It was enough of an experience, that when I decided to continue my academic studies, I transitioned from archaeology to anthropology. I wanted to work with living people for a change. I spent the next 8 years working on graduate level studies, which led me to two years living and working in Belize, and culminated in a PhD in anthropology. While I did not work with contemporary Lenape people, much of my research in Belize was with indigenous people of Maya and Garifuna decent. My interests had strayed a bit, but still aligned with people living a life with stronger ties to the natural world than I was used to in the urban-suburban US. 

Facing an overcrowded, fizzling, and controversial academic market, I switched gears after my PhD to found and build a small brewpub. Six years later, the pandemic hit, economics forced me out of the pub, and I find myself unemployed, and revisiting some of my research interests of years past. I'm working on writing again, developing a research project based around food foraging. My preliminary research has led me all over the place, from brain chemistry and decision making to the global climate crisis. It has also led me back to the Lenape. It turns out, the Lenape were foragers. 

As I have begun collecting and working through the academic literature, mostly journal articles from academic publications, I have been led back around to the people who lived on this land long before me. Just as I physically left this area for a decade, my interests did as well. Now back, living in the woods once again, and my interest in the Lenape has found me as well. Keeping with this circular experience, it is the work of that old university professor from my undergraduate days that caught my attention. Now retired and in his 80s, Dr Marshall Becker has continued to write and publish on his 40+ years of research, and much of it is based on his work on the Lenape.  

Much of what is written about the Lenape (or "the Delaware") describes them as small-scale horticulturalists living in villages up and down the rivers of the mid-Atlantic coast. What I've discovered through Becker's work is that this depiction is not exactly the full story. Through countless hours of archival research, Becker has shown that the Lenape were actually fish people and foragers. You may be familiar with the great fish-based peoples of the Pacific Northwest, whose cultures were largely centered around Salmon and other spawning fish. It turns out the Lenape shared some commonalities with such groups, as they spent much of the year in camps along the rivers, collecting the spawning fish that were once common on the region's waterways. 

Here's why I find this addition to the understanding of the Lenape people intriguing: The Lenape were/are an East Coast indigenous group that were among the first peoples to experience contact with European settlers. Their lifeways were impacted in unknown ways well before anthropologists were able to document many cultural details for posterity. The Lenape had largely migrated westward before there were even universities established to document those cultural attributes. On the other hand, West Coast indigenous peoples were studied by anthropologists and other scientists at later dates, as the colonial-settler expansionism took many years to reach the other side of the continent. As a result, we know much about the cultural details of those West Coast groups. 

So all of this makes me wonder. If the Lenape shared at least similar subsistence strategies with groups from the North West coastal region, what other aspects of their lifeways may have been similar? What insights or understandings may we glean by using a different lens to examine the lives of people living in a place before European expansionism changed everything?