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Lenni Lenape
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Portrait of Tishcohan, a Lenape chief, shown with a small beard, long dark hair, bare chest, and a pipe hanging from a fringed necklace. Map showing the distribution of Indigenous peoples of the Northeast Woodlands region in North America, with tribal names such as Algonquin, Ojibwa (Chippewa), Iroquois, Shawnee, and Powhatan labeled across present-day northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. Major lakes and rivers are marked, and a red boundary outlines the general region inhabited by these groups.
Quick Facts
Also called:
Lenape or Delaware
Key People:
David Brainerd
Frank Gouldsmith Speck
Related Topics:
Northeast Indian
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Portrait of Tishcohan, a Lenape chief, shown with a small beard, long dark hair, bare chest, and a pipe hanging from a fringed necklace.
Lenni Lenape chief Tishcohan

Lenni Lenape

people
Also known as: Delaware, Lenape
Written and fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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Last updated
•History

Lenni Lenape, a confederation of Algonquian-speaking Indigenous peoples of North America who occupied the Atlantic seaboard from Cape Henlopen, Delaware, to western Long Island. Before colonization, they were especially concentrated in the Delaware River valley, leading European settlers to call the confederation the Delaware. However, the people traditionally refer to themselves as Lenape or Lenni Lenape, meaning “real people.”

Traditionally, the Lenni Lenape depended primarily on agriculture, with hunting and fishing as important additions to their economy. Summer farming communities numbered several hundred persons; in winter, smaller family bands traveled throughout smaller territories to hunt. Lenni Lenape individuals were members of one of three clans, based on maternal descent; clans were in turn divided into lineages, whose members generally lived together in a longhouse. Groups of longhouses formed the core of autonomous communities, of which there were probably 30 or 40 in 1600. A council consisting of lineage sachems (chiefs) and other distinguished men decided the public affairs of the community. The eldest woman of the lineage appointed and dismissed the sachem.

The Lenni Lenape were the Native Americans most friendly to William Penn; they were repaid with the infamous Walking Purchase, a treaty that deprived them of their own lands and forced them to settle on lands assigned to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Encroached on by European colonizers and dominated by the Haudenosaunee after 1690, they drifted westward in stages, stopping on the Susquehanna, the Allegheny, and the Muskingum rivers in Ohio and the White River in Indiana. After 60 years of displacement, Lenni Lenape individuals living beyond the Ohio River rekindled a tribal alliance, asserted their independence of the Haudenosaunee, and opposed the advancing colonists. They defeated the British general Edward Braddock in the French and Indian War and at first supported the Americans in the Revolution. In the Treaty of Greenville (1795) they ceded their Ohio lands. Many of the bands dispersed, but by 1835 some had gathered again in Kansas; most of these were removed to Oklahoma in 1867. In the early 2020s more than 20,000 Americans claimed full or partial Lenni Lenape descent.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Teagan Wolter.