Hackensack people

Hackensack was the exonym given by the Dutch colonists to a band of the Lenape, a Native American tribe. The name is a Dutch derivation of the Lenape word for what is now the region of northeastern New Jersey along the Hudson and Hackensack rivers. While the Lenape people occupied much of the mid-Atlantic area, Europeans referred to small groups of native people by the names associated with the places where they lived.

Territory and society

The territory of the Hackensack was variously called Ack-kinkas-hacky, Achkinhenhcky, Achinigeu-hach, Ackingsah-sack, among other spellings (translated as "place of stony ground" or "mouth of a river") and included the areas around the Upper New York Bay, Newark Bay, Bergen Neck, the Meadowlands, and the Palisades.

A phratry of the Lenape, the Hackensack spoke the Unami dialect, one of the two major dialects of the Lenape, or Delaware, languages, which were part of the Algonquian language family. Unami meant the "people down river".

Other bands of Unami speakers in the area included the Raritan on Staten Island/Raritan Bay, the Acquackanonk on the Passaic River, the Tappan along the Palisades and Pascack Valley, and the Pompton people along the Passaic River and Saddle River tributaries. These groups, along with the Wappinger in the Hudson Valley, and Canarsee and Rockaway on Long Island, were sometimes collectively called the River Indians.

The Lenape engaged in agriculture and seasonally migrated, cultivating companion planting at their campsites to supplement foraging, hunting, fishing, trapping, and shellfishing. The terrain they inhabited was diverse: wide tidal flats and oyster beds, forested mountains, and level land that could be cultivated.