"Pressed by white settlers, the Delawares moved to the Tuscarawas branch of the Muskingum River in Ohio. There the American Revolution overtook them. The Delawares divided into neutrals in Ohio, pro-Americans at Pittsburgh, and pro-English Loyalists in northwestern Ohio. (During this time the Delawares occupied the symbolic position of 'women' or peace-keeping matrons in an intertribal league fostered by the Dutch and British in which the Iroquois were the 'men.' In addition, the other Algonquian tribes addressed the Delawares as 'grandfather' at formal gatherings. While these kinship uses were consistent with native practices, they baffled many colonial white officials.)
"During the 1790s, most of the pro-British Munsees went to Canada, where they remain. The Unamis continued west, settling in Indiana (1800-1820), Missouri (1821-29), and Kansas (1830-67) before finally accepting a reservation in Oklahoma (1867 to present: 1996). Along the way a bewildering number of splinter groups were left at each location or set off on their own. Prominent among these were some Unamis who left Indiana and settled along the Mississippi in 1789, allied themselves with the Caddos in Texas, and fled with them to central Oklahoma in 1869.
"Even while moving, again and again, to avoid colonial malice, numbers of Delaware were the victims of repeated atrocities, including the massacres at Pavonia (1643), Paxtung (1763), Gnadenhutten (1782), and Moraviantown (1813).
"After experiencing depopulation, dislocation, and distress in their homeland, the Delawares regrouped in Ohio under the able leadership of Netawatawas (or Newcomber). Later, in Indiana a woman prophet reframed their rituals to reconstitute the kind of ceremony based congregation that had aboriginally defined membership in the greater Delaware community. She gave women a more prominent role at the start and finish of the Gamwing and encouraged young men to take leadership positions. As a consequence of this regrouping, several Delawares were executed for sorcery, as well as for their pro-American and Christian stances.
"Although Delawares were exposed to Lutheran missionaries during the days of the Dutch and Swedish colonies, few listened and fewer converted. An active mission began when Moravians, a sect of pietistic Protestants from central Europe, founded Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1740 and converted Delaware refugees in the area. In Ohio separate Delaware and Mahican mission towns shared the Tuscarawas with followers of the Gamwing and other rites. Over ninety members of the Gnadenhutten, a Christian Delaware town, were massacred by American soldiers in 1782, and the survivors left the United states for Canada, settling Moraviantown on the Thames River. That village was in turn attacked by American forces during their invasion of Canada 1813. Another Moravian mission was attempted in Indiana, but failed in the aftermath of the prophet-led religious fervor.
"In 1833, a few of the Canadian Moravian Delawares rejoined the majority in Kansas but, feeling unwelcome, went back to the Thames. In Kansas, Baptists and Methodists began to convert those Delawares who were living as rural farmers so that, by the time these Unami Delawares moved to Oklahoma, the traditionalists or 'Big House People' were in the minority, continuing to hold the Gamwing every year until 1924, when a brief attenuated revival during World War II" (158 Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Hoxie, ed.)
While the Delaware are described as "Woodlands" Indians in a broad sense in some print matter, the Delawares were known "to themselves as Lenape or Lenni Lenape (People Who Are the Standard)" (157 Hoxie). They spoke a language belonging to the Algonquian or Algic stock.
"Until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries their homeland was the drainage of the Delaware River and all of its tributaries, along with the lower portion of the Hudson River" (157).
"Generally, the Delaware men were hunters, making their weapons and tools of stone and wood, and women were farmers, producing pots, baskets, and leather clothing. Women worked together, but men hunted alone except when everyone helped during fall fire surrounds to capture and kill deer herds" (Hoxie, pg. 157).
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| from Feder's work American Indian Art |
Delaware; wood-carved drumsticks used in Big House ceremonies to beat rhythm on a folded rawhide drum. In the Denver Art Museum.
For examples of Moravian Missionaries you may want to read about David Zeisberger or Nikolaus Ludvig Zinzendorf.
By the time our "great" John Candy died in Oklahoma the great Ghost Dance of 1890 had already happened. But John Candy may have seen the Delaware Big House near Dewey, Oklahoma.
Here's a photograph from 1909 of the north wall of that Big House...
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| photograph by M.R. Harrington |
