The land was granted for the monument by an act of Congress in 1911, but it was never built. Andrew Lanza, Boldeagle resurrected the fight for a national monument to Native Americans at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island. “So, a lot of families did not admit to it, would say they’re of another culture.”Īs an adult, Boldeagle works to combat some of that stigma. “Back in the day, there was a stigma to being native,” says Boldeagle. When her grandfather gave her some traditional Lenape clothing, her grandmother took it away. Growing up, she said her grandmother wouldn’t allow her to tell people she was part Native American. “In this area you’d be very hard-pressed to find anybody that will tell you that they are full-blood Lenape,” says Boldeagle.īoldeagle’s family was typical of many Native American families who were pressured to assimilate in order to avoid discrimination. Margaret Boldeagle of Staten Island is one of them-her grandfather was a Lenape who married an Irish woman. The Lenape who remained in their native lands still have descendants in the area, even if they aren’t part of an official tribe. Smaller bands of Lenape still live in New England and the mid-Atlantic, but most are self-recognized, one exception being the Ramapough Lenape Nation, recognized by the state of New Jersey but not the U.S. Their kinfolk also reside in Ontario, Canada: the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown and the Munsee Delaware Nation. They then purchased a reservation from the Cherokee in Oklahoma, where they reside today, in Bartlesville and Anadarko. government forced the Lenape in Kansas to sell their land so railroad companies could build tracks on it. Louis, and then elsewhere in Missouri before purchasing a reservation in Kansas in 1830 using funds from previous treaties. From there, they settled in Ohio, then Indiana, then St. There are only two federally recognized Delaware tribes in the U.S., and both of them are in Oklahoma, where large groups of the Lenape ended up due to forced migration.Īccording to Zunigha, his people agreed to move out of Lenapehoking, giving up lands they were promised in treaties, and first migrated to Pennsylvania. Like Zunigha, most Lenape today don’t live in New York City or the surrounding area. The area the Lenape occupied before the Europeans arrived was known to them as Lenapehoking, and it covered roughly the area between New York City and Philadelphia, including all of New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and part of the state of Delaware. None of the three co-directors of the Lenape Center live in New York City, but they decided to base their organization there because of its ties to their ancestry. Like many Lenape, he uses the term “Delaware” - the federally recognized name for the Lenape - interchangeably with the group’s own name for itself. Zunigha, however, lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where he also works as the director of cultural resources for the Delaware Tribe of Indians. The center’s mission is to promote Native American arts and humanities, environmental stewardship and Lenape identity. We have a history there before the white man ever showed up, but the Lenape are forgotten because they haven’t had a presence there in decades, centuries,” says Curtis Zunigha, co-director of the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. Some Lenape today, however, are working to bring their heritage back to the city. In one of the most diverse cities in the United States, there are tellingly few native New Yorkers. The Lenape helped shape the geography of modern-day New York City, but other traces of their legacy have all but vanished. It eventually became Wall Street, and Manahatta became Manhattan, where part of the Lenape trade route, known as Wickquasgeck, became Brede weg, later Broadway. The wall, which started showing up on maps in the 1660s, was built to keep out the Native Americans and the British. The transaction, enforced by the eventual building of wall around New Amsterdam, marked the very beginning of the Lenape’s forced mass migration out of their homeland. As the myth goes, the Dutch even “purchased” Manahatta island from the Lenape in 1626. They shared the land and traded guns, beads and wool for beaver furs. When the Dutch arrived in the 17th century in what’s now New York City, their encounters with the indigenous peoples, known as the Lenape, were, at first, mostly amicable, according to historical records.
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