Lenapehoking


Lenapehoking is a term for the lands historically inhabited by the Native American people known as the Lenape in what is now the Mid-Atlantic United States. Much of this land is now heavily urbanized and suburbanized.
Although the Lenape historically accommodated the colonies of New Sweden and New Netherlands, by the early 18th century, warfare with English settlers and forceful expansion of English colonies had depopulated or displaced most surviving tribal peoples. The English colonists and later the US federal government forcibily displaced, through Indian removal policies in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Lenape to Ontario and the Midwestern United States and on to what is now Oklahoma, where they are the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians.

Meaning

Lenape speakers in Oklahoma called their northeaster homelands Lenapehoking, translating to "in the land of the Lenape." This term has gained widespread acceptance and is found widely in recent literature on the Lenape and in New York institutions today.

Range and bounds

At the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Lenape homeland ranged along the Atlantic's coast from western Connecticut to Delaware, which generally encompassed the territory adjacent to the Delaware and lower Hudson river valleys, as well the hill-and-ridge dominated territory between them. Relatives of the Algonquian Amerindians whose territories ranged along the entire coast from beyond the Saint Lawrence River in today's Canada, and the tribes throughout all of New England, down into northern South Carolina, the Delaware Confederation stretched from the southern shores of modern-day Delaware along the Atlantic seaboard into western Long Island and Connecticut, then extended westwards across the Hudson water gap into the eastern Catskills part of the Appalachians range around the headwaters of the Delaware River and along both banks of its basin down to the mouth of the Lehigh.
Inland, the tribe had to deal with the fierce and territorial Susquehannocks; the Delawares' territory has generally been plotted with boundaries along mountain ridges topped by the drainage divides between the right bank tributaries of the Delaware River on the east—and on the west and south—the tributaries of the Susquehanna and Lehigh Rivers; bounds which included the Catskills, northern parts of eastern Pennsylvania down through the entire Poconos along the left bank Lehigh River. The Schuylkill River and its mouth or right bank Lehigh was contested hunting grounds, generally shared with the Susquehannock and the occasional visit by a related Potomac tribe when there wasn't active tribal warfare. The greater Philadelphia area was known to host European to Indian contacts from the Dutch traders contacts with the Susquehanna, English traders, and both tribes with New Netherlands traders after 1610
Along the left bank Delaware valley, the territory extended to all of present-day New Jersey, and the southern counties of New York State, including Rockland, Orange, Westchester, and Putnam Counties, Nassau County, and the five boroughs of New York City.

Today

Numerous Indigenous peoples from diverse tribes, both from the region historically and from elsewhere, live in the Northeast Corridor or Eastern Seaboard. Many of people from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy moved into the area in the 1920s to 1960s and were employed as skyscraper construction workers and played an important role in building the skyline of Philadelphia and New York City. In the University City section of West Philadelphia, there has been some political activity by Urban Indian residents of the area, who adapted the namesake Lenapehoking to where they live.
Lenape nations today control lands within Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

Lenape place names

Lenape place names are used throughout the region.

New York

Manhattan