“We are but a women nation,” explained a young Delaware man in 1758 to a visiting delegation from the Pennsylvania colonial government, and presented three strings of white wampum signifying the peaceful intent of Minisink Delawares living north of the Delaware Water Gap. Ten years later a Moravian missionary expedition up the Beaver River in western Pennsylvania came upon a “Women’s Town,” inhabited primarily by Delaware women who had chosen not to marry. These two snapshots, of peaceful feminized men and independent Amazonian women, occur prominently among the depictions of Delaware Indians in their encounters with European colonists during the...

In 1624, in perhaps the earliest European account of encounters with Lenapes, Nicolaes van Wassenaer related with awe that the people followed closely the movements of the celestial bodies. The first full moon following the end of winter occasioned special celebration. After that, “the women, who in that land provide the food, as respects both planting and gathering, begin to make preparations, and carry their seed into the field.” A few years later another Dutchman, David de Vries, traveled up the Delaware River to trade. His arrival followed a disastrous Indian attack on the Dutch settlement of Swanendael, in which...

While contacts between Lenapes, now called Delawares, and colonists increased after the turn of the century, daily lives and experiences among Indians remain as elusive as ever. Colonial records are rife with minutes from councils held between various Indians and white diplomats. Few Indians are named and almost all of them seem to have been men. No wonder historians have concluded that diplomacy “which like hunting and war involved travel through the woods, was by definition a man’s realm,” while women stayed in the clearing, around the houses. Even though women were present—and sometimes quite active—at the seemingly...

The women in Meniolagomekah made it abundantly clear that they were deeply involved in the well-being of their families and that this concern formed a powerful foundation for their relationships with the missionaries. Yet for Delaware women, just as for other Native women, the missionary contact was entangled in a troublesome paradox concerning the connection between women and power. The missionaries recognized Delaware women’s power only in its allegedly disruptive and evil manifestations, a view colored by the European view of the relationship between women, female sexuality, and Satan. Such a perception distorted and minimized women’s actual spiritual authority—an...

Delaware interaction with Moravian missions was at its most intense in the period between the late 1740s and the massacre of some ninety unarmed Christian Delawares in the town of Gnadenhütten, Ohio, in 1782. These relations, which tied into the spiritual responsibilities that women shouldered, had important ramifications for how Delawares and Moravians came to view one another, and for how Delawares perceived their place in the colonial world. This chapter focuses on women’s religious and spiritual roles among the Delawares. Let us not be deceived by the paucity of records for an earlier period. Women as well as men...

Flickering firelight illuminated the walls of the longhouse and the solemn faces of the men lining each side of the building. The images of our grandmother and our grandfather, carved into the central post, seemed to come alive in the dancing glow from the fire, the vivid black and red patterns undulating in the light to produce the impression of moving eyes and mouths. Under their watching gaze one man seated on the [east] side stood up, held forth a long strip of wampum in his hands, and turned to the elderly man seated directly opposite the post. Carefully he...

There is a spot of land at the edge of the great Pine or Beech Swamp, precisely where it is crossed by the road leading to Wyoming, which is called the Hermit’s Field, and of which the following account is given. A short time before the white people came into Pennsylvania, a woman from some cause or other had separated herself from society, and with her young son, had taken her abode in this swamp, where she remained undiscovered until the boy grew up to manhood, procuring a livelihood by the use of the bow and arrow, in killing deer,...