We wrote this story based on responses from readers and listeners like you. In Montgomery and Delaware counties, what do you wonder about the places, the people, and the culture that you want WHYY to investigate? Let us know here.
More than 1,000 miles from his ancestral homeland, Curtis Zunigha’s gravelly voice managed to drown out the incessant static of a phone line.
All the way from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, you could hear Zunigha’s passion for the countless stories he carries with him of his people, the Lenape.
“I’m preserving in a dynamic way our culture and our history and our traditions, so that I could pass that on to a younger generation and they can keep going, because that’s our obligation to the creator and to the ancestors, for the gift of our culture and our language and our knowledge of who we were and who we are,” he said.
Zunigha is an enrolled member and cultural director of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, one of three federally recognized tribes of the Lenape in the United States — none of which are currently located in their original homeland.
The Lenape, whose name means “the real people,” are indigenous to the Delaware Valley. From parts of New York and eastern Pennsylvania to New Jersey and the coast of Delaware, the Lenape lived in this region for thousands of years. Those relatively newer place names are products of the same colonization that violently uprooted the native people from the area once known as Lenapehoking.
Curtis Zunigha is an enrolled member and cultural director of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. (Courtesy of Curtis Zunigha)
How the Lenape ended up displaced from their homeland…