BY ALEX ISRAEL

In print | Published January 22, 2009

In the minds of many, the history of the Philadelphia area is intertwined primarily with Protestant colonialism. The name of William Penn rises easily to the lips of most Pennsylvania residents, who take pride in the region’s history as a haven of religious freedom for Quakers and other persecuted groups. This picture, however, represents a case of historical amnesia that overlooks the history of the original inhabitants of the Delaware Valley: the Lenape Nation, also known as the Delaware.

The Swarthmore linguistics department is hoping to change that limited perception. A new course this semester, Introduction to the Lenape Language, offers students exposure to the eponymous ancestral tongue of the Philadelphia area and its precarious contemporary situation as an endangered language. It also provides students with an understanding of the quickly disappearing Lenape culture.

Further, Chair of the Linguistics Department Ted Fernald hopes that the course has the potential to contribute to the local Lenape community’s ongoing effort to not only preserve but also revitalize its heritage. “We’re used to thinking of colleges and universities offering a standard package, but Swarthmore is situated in a particular place, one with a history, and it doesn’t have to be the same as everywhere else,” he said, adding that “We’ve got this going on in our backyard … I wanted to see if there was something we could do to help.”

So far, the class has drawn students keen on being a part of this revitalization process. “It’s learning with a purpose,” Zack Wiener ’12 said, adding that he became interested in language revitalization after attending a talk on language endangerment by linguistics professor K. David Harrison. “I came to Swarthmore to do this kind of thing, something that’s not available at other colleges,” Wiener said.

Swarthmore is uniquely placed to take part in the Lenape language revitalization effort. In addition to its location in the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people, the college is home to the Friends Historical Library, which contains documents pertaining to Lenape history.

Most significantly, the library contains documents that discuss the contentious Walking Purchase, also known as the Walking Treaty of 1737. Long after Penn’s death, his descendants, in need of vast tracts of lands to sell to pay off debts, presented this treaty to the Lenape, claiming that Penn and the ancestors of the Lenape had created an unfulfilled agreement which would grant Penn as much land as a man could walk in a day and a half. Whether William Penn originally drew up this treaty or not, the descendents managed to claim an area of nearly 70 miles wide by clearing the path in advance and hiring runners to make the trip.

After the Walking Purchase, the Lenape tribe was scattered to locations across North America, including Ontario, Wisconsin and Oklahoma, where the most active Lenape tribes are found. Until recently, the Lenape of Oklahoma didn’t recognize the Pennsylvania Lenape as members of the same tribe. Last May, a Lenape workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania in conjunction with a conference on Native American languages in crisis marked the first time that representatives of different Lenape groups came together to discuss the future of their culture and language.

The representative of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania was Shelley DePaul, the instructor of Swarthmore’s Lenape Language course. DePaul, a speaker of the Unami dialect of Lenape, wrote in an email, “My first interest and passion has always been to learn the language, to re-teach it to the members of my community, and to work towards its preservation.”

According to Fernald, DePaul arrived at the conference with a curriculum for a Lenape course already prepared. This led to a meeting, chaired by DePaul, at Swarthmore last November, during which discussion of a possible Lenape course at Swarthmore began. “My goal … is to tap into the most valuable resource [Swarthmore] has to offer … its students … and to guide and motivate them so that they might exercise their own creativity and expertise in an effort to revitalize the language,” DePaul wrote. She hopes the course will increase awareness of the Lenape language and culture.

While acknowledging that the Lenape language course is still in the experimental stage, Fernald remains “cautiously optimistic” about the prospect of further Lenape studies at Swarthmore. In the future he would like to see collaboration between the Pennsylvania Lenape community and the college. For now, however, Fernald would just like to make known the pre-European history of the area in which we live, a history of which even the most knowledgeable Swatties are often ignorant.

“People at Swarthmore are really concerned about genocide,” Fernald said, “and they wonder what a society would look like after it had forgotten about genocide, what a society would look like if it denied its past crimes. They don’t realize that all they have to do is look in a mirror.” Thanks to the new Lenape course, that history is more likely to be remembered.

Learning Lenape
He Elankumankik Hello my relations.
Temike! Welcome!
Kulimalsi hech? How are you?
Kteluwensi hech? What is your name?
Ktahpi Lenapehoking You are in the land of the Lenape.
Ktalenixsi hech? Do you speak Lenape?
Ntite ta ne le! I think so.
Yu tali, xaxeli utenaya luwentasuwak Lenape Lixsewakanink Many towns here have Lenape names.
Lapich knewel I will see you again.

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