Lenape

The Lenape (English: , , ; Lenape languages: [lənaːpe]), also called the Lenni Lenape and Delaware people, are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who live in the United States and Canada.

The Lenape's historical territory included present-day northeastern Delaware, all of New Jersey, the eastern Pennsylvania regions of the Lehigh Valley and Northeastern Pennsylvania, and New York Bay, western Long Island, and the lower Hudson Valley in the state of New York. Today communities are based in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

During the last decades of the 18th century, European settlers and the effects of the American Revolutionary War displaced most Lenape from their homelands and pushed them north and west. In the 1860s, under the Indian removal policy, the U.S. federal government relocated most Lenape remaining in the Eastern United States to the Indian Territory and surrounding regions.

Federally recognized Lenape tribes are the Delaware Nation and Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma, and the Stockbridge–Munsee Community in Wisconsin. Lenape in Canada are the Munsee-Delaware Nation, Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and the Delaware First Nation of the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario.

Name

The name Lenni Lenape originates from two autonyms, Lenni, which means "genuine, pure, real, original", and Lenape, meaning "real person" or "original person". Lënu may be translated as "man". Adam DePaul, member of the unrecognized Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, calls the name "an anglicized grammatical error that basically translates as the 'original people people'".