The River Named the People<\/h3>\n
Caponokonickon and his family walked the paths that led from the Raritan Bay west to a grand and beneficent river, which his people called \u201cKithanne Whittuck\u201d and the country next to it \u201cLenape Wihittuck.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> The Europeans had other names for the river. The first of those white-skinned \u2018salt people\u20192<\/a><\/sup> who came to trade there in the 1620s were Dutch, and they called it Zuydt Kille, or South River. The Noort Kille (North River) was to the east, where the Dutch had their town of New Amsterdam.3<\/a><\/sup> Then in 1664 new people came to replace these Dutch traders. They had a different language and a different king, which seemed odd to the Indians. They were English, and they changed the name of the Noort Kille to the Hudson River, after Henry Hudson who sailed it in 1609. And they changed the name of the Zuydt Kille to the Delaware River.<\/p>\n In 1610, when the only English in America were a few starving colonists in Virginia, Samuel Argall, one of the settlers at Jamestown, sailed north looking for provisions. He happened upon \u201ca very great bay\u201d which he named \u201cCape La Warre,\u201d after the third Lord De la Warr (Sir Thomas West), his employer and governor of the Virginia colony. Soon after this, other English explorers discovered the river that emptied into the bay or \u201cCape,\u201d \u00a0which Henry Hudson had already seen in 1609. Apparently ignorant of Hudson\u2019s visit, they abbreviated the name of the river and the bay to \u201cDelaware.\u201d Sir Thomas never saw it. He spent only one year in Virginia before leaving for England to recover from illness. In 1618 he attempted to return, but died on board ship.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n In the provinces of East and West New Jersey,\u00a0there were many different groups of Indians who spoke various dialects of Algonkian, including the Raritan and the Sankikans. The English simplified everything by calling all the Indians who lived on either side of the Delaware River \u201cDelawares,\u201d no matter what group they belonged to. They were all Delawares to the English, who were using that term as early as 1678.5<\/a><\/sup> The Indians found this offensive, so the English assured them that Delaware was the name of a great English chief, which made it less insulting.6<\/a><\/sup> Herbert Kraft related a Lenape version of how the name came to be:7<\/a><\/sup> When a white man asked a certain Indian what tribe he belonged to, he answered \u201cLenape.\u201d The white man kept mispronouncing the name until he finally got it right, at which the Lenape said Nal n\u00eb nd\u00ebluvw\u00e8n! meaning, That\u2019s what I said! But nd\u00ebluvw\u00e8n sounded like Delaware to the English speaker, so he decided that that was a much easier name to use. Kraft does not say where this particular Indian lived, but since he called himself Lenape, he probably lived in Pennsylvania. The story seems highly contrived to me.<\/p>\n As this story shows, the Indians of the Delaware valley had some trouble communicating with these new people.\u00a0When Caponokonickon spoke to them, he used a trade dialect, a simplified language that the Indians had developed ever since the Dutch began to trade with them in the 1620s.8<\/a><\/sup> These traders learned the dialect and became translators for everyone else. They were rough people who had little education. Many could barely read or write, so the names they said the Indians used were probably not exactly like the actual thing. More important, the officials who had dealings with the Indians, and also had a proper education, did not bother to learn their languages; they relied on the interpreters.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n But there were some educated people who did take the trouble to learn the language\u2014German missionaries. The Moravians and others who settled northwest New Jersey and northeast Pennsylvania in the mid-18th<\/span>\u00a0century saw the native people as God\u2019s children, like themselves. So they had an incentive to learn the languages, and their writings became the standard reference regarding Indians in these places right up to the late 20th<\/span>\u00a0century.10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Many writers have used words to describe the Indians of New Jersey in ways that Caponokonickon would not have recognized. For a long time, people thought there were three \u201ctribes\u201d of Lenape, the Minsi or Minisinks whose totem was the wolf; the Unami or Turtle tribe; and the Unalachtigo or Turkey tribe. These terms were not used by the Indians themselves, but instead\u00a0came from the writings of early Moravians missionaries like David Zeisberger, John G. E. Heckewelder and George Loskiel, who used those animals as symbols to help them keep track of matriarchal relationships. They were a sort of mnemonic device to sort out the cultural practices of the different groups. And the word \u2018tribe\u2019 is also wrong. The Indians of New Jersey lived in small groups of related people, perhaps no more than 40 in any single group. To the extent that these various groups or bands had connections with other groups, by kinship and language, one might use the term association, but not tribe.11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Names used for New Jersey\u2019s Indians like Munsee, Unami, Unilachtigo, were not used by them when Europeans were first settling here. They do not appear in records until the mid 18th<\/span>-century, when the missionaries were at work and the Indian exodus from New Jersey was well underway. So they have little meaning when studying the Indians who inhabited what became Delaware Township in the late 17th<\/span>\u00a0century. In fact, there were no \u201cUnalachtigo\u201d living in colonial New Jersey; the term was used in the mid 18th<\/span>\u00a0century for Lenape in Ohio. The name Munsee came to be used in 1727 to designate Indians living in the northwestern part of New Jersey, but those people had lived throughout New Jersey and southern New York for hundreds of years, only migrating to the Forks of the Delaware when their lands to the east had been sold.12<\/a><\/sup> In the 18th century, the name Munsee was used to designate all the Indians living above the Raritan River, going as far north as Kingston, New York and into northeastern Pennsylvania. An earlier name for them was Esopus. They spoke a Munsee dialect which differed from that used by Lenape living south of Philadelphia, and the people have called Lenopi living south of the Raritan River in New Jersey.13<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n The name Unami does not appear until 1757. It meant ‘people from down river,’ and soon became a widely used designation for those Indians living along the Delaware River south of Easton, PA, and also along the Raritan River valley\u00a0in New Jersey. The Unami could barely be understood by the Munsee and vice versa. Eventually, the Unami migrated west and most of their descendants today live in Oklahoma. The Munsee joined with the Minisinks and migrated northwestward to Ontario, Canada or Wisconsin.14<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n As you can see, I am using terms that I have just denigrated. They have come into common usage, and are now hard to do without. But perhaps they should be given up.<\/p>\n This is a relatively new question. For hundreds of years, non-Indians have called the Indian residents of New Jersey Lenape or Lenni Lenape. But during all that time, no one has looked closely for evidence of what the Indians called themselves. During the last 30 years or so, Marshall Becker has been doing just that\u2014examing documents from the late 17th\u00a0and 18th\u00a0\u00a0century to find an Indian name for New Jersey Indians.15<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n He found that the Indians living on the east side of the Delaware River and south of the Raritan Valley were culturally different from those living north of the Raritan, and from those on the west side of the Delaware. Those western people were the Indians who sold large tracts of land to William Penn in 1682 and called themselves Lenape. It is Becker\u2019s belief that the Lenape never lived in New Jersey, which does not sit well with many people. It is probably his use of the word \u201cLenopi\u201d to identify the Indians living in south Jersey that people find hard to accept. But Becker did not make the name up; it was used by a native of south Jersey in 1758. \u00a0Up until that time, there is no record of what the Indians on the east side of the river called themselves. To the English who dealt with them, they were \u201cJerseys\u201d or \u201criver Indians.\u201d<\/p>\nThe Delaware River\u2019s Name<\/h4>\n
A New Name for an Old People<\/h4>\n
The Language<\/h4>\n
Names for the People<\/h3>\n
What to Call New Jersey\u2019s Indians ?<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/goodspeedhistories.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/1LenapeMap.png\" "\\"Lenape")
<\/a>