Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
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Source: July 1990 Volume 28 Number 3, Pages 97–102


Recreating Lenape Indian Crafts

Ruth Gold West

Page 97

My interest in the Indians stems from my interest in crafts. All my life I wanted to be a boy, living in the outdoors and making things.

The things I have brought with me to share with you today represent various Lenape articles which I have duplicated. I have recreated a number of their crafts to show that they still could be made today.

(It has turned out that I also have another interest in the Lenape; it's very interesting how things sometimes come together. As you know, the Lenape were called the Delaware by the English. Ten years ago I was a wild, old-maid school teacher. Then I married my neighbor. His name is West, and although he is a staunch old Irish Catholic from Baltimore, in his family are also the English and Welsh who were the first settlers of the Virginia-Maryland area. It was his ancestor, Sir Thomas West De LaWarr -- he was governor of Virginia -- who sent a small boat from the Virginia colonies in 1610 up to a body of water which he named the De LaWarr Bay. By 1613 it had become the Delaware Bay, with the river flowing into it called the Delaware River. And so the Indians in the are aware similarly referred to as the Delaware Indians.)

The Lenape or Delaware were Algonquins, a social and language group that was a part of the Eastern Woodland Indians. The Lenni-Lenape lived along the Delaware, and also in New Jersey. Farther to the south were the Wiccomiss, the Conoy, the Nanticokes, all related. They had a common way of life, living in the woodlands.

Page 98

And it was the woodlands that determined how they lived. Their surroundings and environment and the materials that were available to them determined how they built their houses, the clothing they wore, the food they ate, and the game they hunted.

There is a big mistake in history about the Lenape. I guess it's because Americans like to classify everything, but the early writers described three separate tribes of the Lenape. One of these writers, a missionary named Hechweiler, made an extensive study of the Lenape on the banks of the Brandywine in the early 1700s, ard he developed the idea that the Munsee (wolf), Unachtilago (turkey), and Unami (turtle) were three separate groups. They really were not, at least in the beginning.

In the summer the Lenape moved down to the Jersey seashore. They lived on the water. Their life was quite communal, with a ceremonial lodge or "big house" in the center of a small village. They lived in the central village for protection, and farmed the surrounding areas. Their houses were made of bark.

They also had strict behavioral laws that they did not break. They were a private people. There was a men's beach and a women's beach, and they did not bathe together.

The Lenapes were a peaceful group. They were not savages or uncivilized, and it was not until the establishment of the fur trade with European traders, when Indians of the New York tribes invaded their territory and came down to get beaver pelts, that their tribal structure and organization disintegrated. (The beaver pelt was the most important in the fur trade, partly because the beaver have only one litter a year. Muskrats, on the other hand, have litter after litter, but not so with the beaver.) But in the early 1600s the Lenape cleared the land, they built homes, and they hunted and fished, using the materials at hand.

There is an interesting book, put out by the Rutgers University Press in New Jersey, called Dickon Among the Indians. (Because some people thought it was a children's book, it was later re-issued under the title of The Indians of New Jersey.) It is about an English boy who falls overboard and is captured by the Indians, who turn him over to an old squaw. To humiliate him, she made him do women's work, and the activities of the Lenape women are described in detail in the book. (The descriptions and illustrations, incidentally, also make it an excellent source for crafts people.)

The Lenape women all wore skirts, big wrap-around skirts -- one size fits all -- which they looped over a belt at the waist. In cool weather they also wore capes, and in very cold weather maybe a fur coat over top.

The belts were usually decorated with shells and quill work, and later with beads after they were introduced by the Europeans and brought in for trading.

Page 99

Both the men and women also liked to wear a leather strap with an ornament around their necks as a necklace or gorget. They were decorated with bones, shells, or seeds, drilled with a bone or stone tool. I have here a choker necklace, made out of the shoulder blades of chickens or turkeys; it was made by an Indian woman who brings Indian crafts up to the Warwick County Frontier Day festival.

The women took care of the fires and the cooking. They prepared "the three sisters" -- squash (or pumpkin), corn, and beans. When you think of it, it was a pretty good diet: the squash provided Vitamin C, the beans provided protein, and the corn gave them the carbohydrates or starch, so they really had a good diet on which to survive. For meat, they had an abundance of fish and small game, duck and turkey. Along the Delaware and Jersey shore there were a great many black mussels and other shellfish; they ate great quantities of oysters. Ducks of all kinds were plentiful, as were wild turkev. To catch turkey or ducks or other small game, traps were used, both snares and fall traps or spring traps. (It is interesting how the mind of man seems to come up with many of the same objects in every culture, even when the cultures were apparently unknown to each other. The spring trap is an example of this.) Deer were caught by driving them into pens. They, of course, provided not only food, but also hides for clothing and other purposes.

Cooking was done over an open fire, or on hot flat rocks, or by baking in mud under hot coals.

To grind corn they used mortars. I have tried several times to burn one out of a log, but every time it caught fire, and so I have not been particularly successful with this activity. I also tried to carve one out with a bone tool, using a piece of bone shattered from a large beef bone, but I was never able to finish a mortar completely. I have been able to carve out several gourd cups, however, using bone and stone tools to scrape them out.

I also have yet to finish an acorn project. In addition to corn meal, the Lenape used acorn for flour. They ground them, put them through three boilings of water, and then made bread or cakes out of them. But I haven't done it yet. It is a very long process -- you have to peel the bark off each acorn before you grind them! Flour was also made from the roots of the cattail; they were dug up, peeled, and then cooked in hot water to make a thick paste. If the paste was allowed to settle and the water then poured off, what was left was dried and became a flour that could also be used for bread or pancakes.

The Lenape had no thread. And apart from food, the most basic need for survival is thread. You need it for clothing, for traps and fish lines, and for other purposes, and they didn't have it. In the west there was cotton, and the Navajo very early developed cotton weaving in the southwest Navajo country. But not here. The only material the Lenape had was bark -- and so they used bark to make twine.

Page 100

I found out how it was done one summer down at the shore, from a man who was putting in pilings. He was using white cedar, and when he stripped off the bark, under the bark is a brown material. Cut into long strips about a half an inch wide, this under bark can be woven or braided into a strong twine that could be used for clothing and traps and fish lines.

I made a ladies over-the-shoulder bag with some twine that I braided, and it took me three months just to braid enough bark into twine to make the bag. So you can imagine that one of the principal things the women had to do all winter long was twining. They braided yards and yards and yards of twine for traps and fish nets. Just think of the amount of work that went into making enough twine for a fishing net thirty or forty feet long to be put across the Schuylki11 during the shad run or across other rivers and streams.

The inner bark of the basswood or linden, slippery elm, or milkweed were also used to make twine. I made an excellent fishing line by - braiding one-half inch strips of green inner barkskin from milkweed stems. It took bundles and bundles of green bark to make it. The sinker is a flat stone shaped like a butterfly, and the hook is made from a notched stick. It's really a stout line, and you could catch a pretty good-sized fish with it!

Bark was also used in making houses, and for mats, bowls, and baskets. The inner bark of the white cedar was used in making baskets as well as to make twine, especially as the white cedar is resistant to water decay. (That is why it is used for the pilings at the shore.) There was a lot of white cedar along the Jersey coast. The outer bark was obtained by burning the tree at its base, and then peeling the bark off the trunk with a stone scraper. For mats you need strips about eight feet long.

Vines such as honeysuckle or bittersweet were more often used in making baskets. They were (and are) abundant. They were pliable and easy to bend and tie. And they are generally even in their width. I have made baskets about seven inches high and five inches across, using honeysuckle,in an afternoon. Honeysuckle, incidentally, can be made a beautiful white color by boiling it for about a half an hour and then rubbing off the outer bark. But bittersweet vines make a stronger basket; I used bittersweet for my baskets with handles on them.

Page 101

Their pottery was unique. They used clay that was found along streams or in deposits in the pine barrens of New Jersey, and their pots were egg-shaped. All their pots were pointed at the bottom so that they heated evenly and so that food could not stick in the corners and burn. The clay was rolled into long strips or "ropes", six inches long or longer, and the pot was built up by coiling these strips. After the coils were set in place, the inside and outside of the pot were smoothed with a flat pebble and water. I am not a clay person. For one thing, the clay is very goo-ey, and you have to have a lot of interest to dry the clay, make the strips, shape the pot, and then fire it. It is quite a long process.

The Lenape also played quite a few games. This is a lacrosse stick that I made. It's made from rawhide and a fresh pine bough. I pulled the bough around to make the curve at the top, and then tied it tight with the rawhide. I soaked the rawhide in a tub for a day or two, until it was soft, and then cut it and spliced it. Now it is quite hard. One time when I was at a school a young boy showed me a stone that was almost a perfect sphere and about the size of a golf ball. It fitted right into this lacrosse stick that I had made. You certainly wouldn't want to get hit by it, but that's what they used for a ball, a round stone about the size of a golf ball.

The Lenape could speak numbers, but they had no written language. So they kept score with counting sticks. Everybody who played games had his bundle of counting sticks, perhaps a hundred altogether, that he polished upon winter nights and used to keep score.

They apparently liked to gamble, and played a number of games of chance. They were known even to have wagered off their wives, everything. They played dice games. They would take three seashells and hide a pebble or nut under one of them, and the other player would try to guess under which shell it was.

Page 102

They played a game they called "oya'quallis", in which a hollow bone was attached to one end of a thong about three feet long and a needle-shaped piece of wood was attached to the other, the object being to swing the bone up into the air and then spear it with the stick. They played pick-up-sticks, which they called "selartik'an". And in each case the score was kept with the counting sticks.

The Lenape liked music. The hoof of a deer was hollowed out and a little stone hung inside it to make a nice little bell. They also had flutes as well as percussion instruments, but the flute that I made had only two notes. The flute was used in courting. It was the custom for a young man to make his own flute and then play a tune to serenade the young girl he wanted to marry. (He thought nobody in the village knew what it meant, but everybody had gone through the same ritual!)

The "big house" ceremony was in November, to thank their Manito, or God, for the blessings of the harvest. The men danced and the women danced. It was also the time of the manhood ceremonies, when the older boys would explain the visions they had had when they went out by themselves, choose a name, and be formally initiated into manhood. The ceremony was a six-day long affair, a long affair with lots of eating and lots of dancing.

Creation, they believed, revolved around the turtle. A turtle with a tree growing out of its back was a symbol for the land, the tree having come down through a hole in the skies and landing on the turtle. Then somehow life came about.

There is a very fine museum in the Poconos, near Allentown. It is run by descendants of the Lenape, and there are a number of rooms with exhibits and various artifacts. If you are interested in the Lenape and their crafts, it's a great place to go.

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Resources

Lenni Lenape Historical Society. Allentown, Pa.

M. R. Harrington: The Indians of New Jersey, Dickon Among the Indians Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N. J.

William Penn: William Penn's Own Account of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians. Middle Atlantic Press.

Keith Wilbur: The New England Indians. Globe Pequot Press, Chester, Conn

W. Ben Hunt: Indiancraft.

 
 

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