Tag: Delaware Tribe

A quarter of a millennium ago, the last publicly identified members of the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) tribe of Native Americans were forcibly removed from the territory in Eastern Pennsylvania where they had fought to establish a homeland. [1] Today there remains almost no public awareness of the scale and scope of this great historic crime, though the Delaware people remain active in drawing attention to their struggles both past and present. [2]

The real story of the removal of the Delaware clashes with the “official” narrative of American history as laid out by the New York Times. In 2019, the Times’ 1619 Project argued that America’s “true founding” was the year of the arrival of the first slave ship in Port Comfort, Virginia. Fundamental to the 1619 Project was the claim that “black Americans fought back alone” to “make America a democracy.” To the Times and the 1619 Project, the American Revolution was a counterrevolution led by reactionaries aimed at protecting slavery. The argument of 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Times amounted to a declaration that the British Empire was the progressive force in the struggle against the colonists.

The World Socialist Web Site and a section of principled historians have exposed the New York Times and the 1619 Project’s false, pseudo-historical foundation, but one element which has not been sufficiently addressed is its lack of any serious reference to the struggles of the Native Americans to resist the encroachment of their lands by the British Empire. Even the selection of 1619 as the year of America’s “true founding” leaves out the fact that the immensely complex and ultimately tragic dynamic between the Native population and Europeans began years earlier upon the arrival of the first colonists.

1619 Project [Photo]

This essay recounts the Delaware tribe of Native Americans…

Continue reading

The Delaware District 3 team certainly must have been having a case of déjà vu last Sunday, Aug. 7, when they battled it out with Southwest (District 9, Waco, Texas) in the Senior League Softball World Series championship final on Layton Field at the Lower Sussex Little League Complex at the Pyle Center in Roxana.

The local contingent jumped out to a 3-0 lead and seemed to be playing with much confidence, especially with one of the largest crowds the tournament has seen in all the years it has been played in Roxana. Kinsley Hall was mowing the Southwest hitters down, and her defense was flawless behind her.

Until that one fateful inning… again.

Just like in their loss to Southwest in pool play on Tuesday, Aug. 5, Delaware District 3 somehow lost the momentum, and thereby the game, when the team from Texas had their bats come alive. Southwest collected six of their eight hits in the game during their 9-run 6th inning, with the biggest blow coming from K. Alonzo as she ripped a pitch deep over the left-centerfield fence for a grand-slam home run and a 9-3 Southwest lead.

The girls from District 3 were stunned. The many fans from all over the area — many from Delaware and Maryland — were speechless. Collectively, they could not believe it had happened again.

“We knew they were a good team and could hit the ball well,” said District 3 head coach Sarah Hoban. “This was a seven-inning game, and six of those innings I was really proud of the way they played,” she said of her team. “Just that one inning… This whole World Series, we had two bad innings — both against this team — and we’re just gonna try to hold onto the good innings, the good memories.

“They played hard…

Continue reading

ROXANA – The tears will dry.

The regrets will fade.

The night in the national limelight and the attention it brought their community will become a memory to treasure for the Sussex County all-star softball players.

But they’ll also remember how close they were to the Senior Little League World Series title and the catastrophic inning that derailed them Sunday night on the Lower Sussex Little League’s Bruce Layton Field.

Southwest regional champion Waco, Texas, erupted for all of its runs in the sixth inning, courtesy of seven hits, the last Ky-Li Alonzo’s grand slam, to rally past the host team 9-5.

“It was still an awesome experience, no matter how it turned out. It was great” Lower Sussex catcher Lily Hoban said, still fighting tears and her voice cracking. “Just the time I got to spend with the team, being with them, playing with them, just being with the girls.

“We knew we could do this,” added the rising senior at nearby Indian River High. “We had a bad inning. It’s hard when it’s just one inning, and it just got out of our grip pretty quickly.”

ESPN2 aired the game nationally and several hundred fans filled just about every space around the field and in bleachers where they could see the action, including state-flag-waving Delaware and Texas rooters.

Lower Sussex led 3-0 entering the top of the sixth and starting pitcher Kinsley Hall had allowed just two hits and struck out seven.

“They got one hit, they got another and they went crazy,” said Hall, who was relieved in the inning by Megan Daisey, whose luck wasn’t any better. “We couldn’t stop the momentum. They were hitting good.

“It’s disappointing, but it happens,” added Hall, also heading into her senior year at Indian River.

Waco, which won all seven of its tournament games, had also erased a 3-0 lead…

Continue reading

Both the national park and surrounding preserve — with a planned Lenape cultural center — would utilize federal lands that make up the national recreation area now. 

“We would divide it up with 10% or 15% of the land becoming the national park, which would run like an emerald ribbon of green along the Delaware River and other attractions in the watershed, including some of the waterfalls and things like that,” Donahue explained.

While several Lenape tribes and nations told PA Local they have no objection to the proposal in theory, none knew enough about it to be certain. 

“This is the first I’m hearing of it,” said Chief Brad KillsCrow of The Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, one of three federally recognized Lenape tribes in the U.S. that were forcibly removed from homelands in and around the Delaware River and water gap and driven west. 

“If somebody’s going to talk about our tribes, our ancestors, and our history, it’d be nice to be involved in that.”

Representatives of another tribe — the Delaware Nation in Anadarko, Oklahoma — told PA Local that while their Historic Preservation Office has a vague recollection of being approached about the project some time ago, they’ve heard nothing since.

Adam Waterbear DePaul, a tribal council member with the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, which is not federally recognized, said they haven’t heard from organizers either.

“It came to our attention through backchannels,” he said. “We have not been involved at all.”

A release from the Sierra ​​Club’s New Jersey chapter trumpeting the project — formally dubbed the Delaware River National Park and Lenape Preserve by organizers — touts the “informal endorsement from many tribal leaders” and upcoming “formal endorsement” from several tribal nations. 

Donahue was less definitive, saying, “I didn’t put that out.” 

He added: “A member of our steering committee has reached out to…

Continue reading

Millions of people visit New York each year from around the world. They come to see Times Square or the Statue of Liberty, to work, to study. Yet they may not even know they’re in Lenapehoking, the land of the Lenape people, also called Lenape’ok or Delaware.

Our homeland spans the watershed ecology of the Delaware River, including also the lower Hudson River, and the Atlantic coastline from the mouth of the Hudson to the mouth of the Delaware. Today it holds places that are essential to the American identity, like Philadelphia and New York City.

Advertisement

All of the sovereign nations of the Lenape people were driven out of Lenapehoking by plagues, war, exploitative treaties and scalp bounties. Our homeland was taken from us, but we are reclaiming our voices and our places there.

Last fall I traveled to Lenapehoking on assignment, bringing three other Lenape’ok with me: Lauryn French, Trinity Guido and my adult child, River Whittle.

But we weren’t tourists. We never could be, even if we’d never been there before. We were returning to our family — a place that’s woven into our identity and literally in our blood.

Parts of the trip were painful. We saw land that holds the bones of our ancestors, now covered in concrete and asphalt. We thought about the brutality inflicted on our people.

Advertisement

But it wasn’t just that. There was also joy.

“Do I want to go back sad? I feel like there have been so many tears in the hundreds of years that we’ve been removed. My line has cried enough about our homeland,” Lauryn said. “I’m going to go and be happy. I am going to go and enjoy it. Everything in my line told me that was not supposed to happen.”

Returning To…

Continue reading

isIE8 = true; Date.now = Date.now || function() { return +new Date; }; Continue reading

In a cavernous Smithsonian Institution workshop, a team of imaging experts laser scans a small, hand-carved cedar hat. It was crafted more than 140 years ago from a solid piece of wood and depicts a bear with large copper eyes. In a few hours, the experts will have a videoconference with members of the Haida Nation in British Columbia to go over the progress they’ve made on their collaborative goal: creating a digital three-dimensional model of this clan crest hat, an object of significant cultural importance for the Haida.

The project is the latest in a series of similar partnerships between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and Indigenous North American groups. Eric Hollinger, tribal liaison at NMNH’s repatriation office, says such groups are increasingly turning to 3-D technology to document and even replicate their cultural objects. “We want to be clear this is not in lieu of repatriation,” the legally mandated return of eligible original objects and Indigenous human remains from museums, Hollinger says. Instead the goal of this work is to help safeguard the legacy of fragile items by creating digital models for preservation and education, as well as physical replicas that can be displayed or even used in ceremonies when originals cannot.

These collaborations started in 2007, when the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, the Delaware Nation and the Delaware Tribe of Indians asked NMNH to 3-D print copies of a 17th-century pewter tobacco pipe that the museum was preparing to repatriate. Because cultural strictures required the reburial of the original pipe—a funerary object—tribal officials requested three replicas that could be used to educate people about the pipe’s history and the repatriation. Hollinger worked with the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office (DPO) to 3-D print the pipe replicas with silica. Although NMNH had been using 3-D…

Continue reading

Thank you.

Those were the first two words Lehigh Valley Softball Carpenter Cup coach Brian Fehnel had for his players on Wednesday afternoon as they gathered one final time behind a dugout at FDR Park in Philadelphia.

Lehigh Valley’s run ended with a 7-3 defeat to Mid-Penn in the semifinals of the 17th annual tournament sponsored by the Phillies.

On their return trip to the sprawling park adjacent to the Philly sports complex, the local girls showed their grit one more time in a 5-3 come-from-behind win over defending Carpenter Cup champ Delaware South to advance to the final four.

However, the team couldn’t muster another rally after getting behind 6-0 to a Mid-Penn team featuring players from schools such as Cumberland Valley, Central Dauphin, Cedar Cliff, Chambersburg and Shippensburg.

They still stirred enough to get some runs on the board and demonstrated unity and enthusiasm until the end and finished the tournament with a 3-2 record.

It was near carbon copy of how things went in 2021 when Lehigh Valley also went 3-2 and reached the tournament semifinals before suffering an 11-8 loss to Mid-Penn. Mid-Penn also followed the same script as in 2021, losing the title game 1-0 to Jersey Shore.

But while they had the same record, this year’s Lehigh Valley team had surprising success considering it looked as though the Lehigh Valley wouldn’t have a team after Blake Morgan, who ran the local Carpenter Cup squad for several years, retired as Whitehall’s coach last year.

It wasn’t until mid-May when Fehnel was asked and agreed to take on the team. A few phone calls were made and tryouts arranged and a few practices were held before the team headed to Philly at dawn on Monday morning for its first game.

“These are just a great group of kids,” Fehnel said. “They don’t quit. We only…

Continue reading

The decision comes after video of a ceremony before a game went viral and the Delaware Tribe called on the school to stop.

ANDERSON, Ind. — Anderson Community Schools has permanently discontinued a pregame routine that has been held at high school basketball games.

It comes after video of the ceremony went viral and the Delaware Tribe called on the school to stop.

(Note: The video attached is an earlier 13News story on the mascot controversy.)

According to our partners at the Herald Bulletin, the school board voted unanimously Tuesday to eliminate the ritual and to move toward a formal partnership with the tribe.

Under an agreement, the school would keep the Indians mascot name and logo.

“We will continue our commitment to show our students that when the time comes, we do make right decisions, not necessarily the easy ones,” ACS Superintendent Dr. Joe Cronk said during his presentation to the board.

Chief KillsCrow had been in talks with Cronk after a viral TikTok surfaced that appears to show students performing in Native American garb before a basketball game. The school district said the 70-plus year tradition is meant to honor Chief William Anderson, for whom the city of Anderson is named. But the Delaware Tribe said the school’s tradition falls short. 

KillsCrow argued the performance didn’t show the identity of their Lenape Tribe. For example, Chief Anderson wouldn’t wear the garb of the school mascot.

Amid the controversy, Anderson High School then suspended the use of its mascot pending an internal review. 

KillsCrow said previously he would work to educate others about his tribe.

RELATED: Superintendent will take Anderson mascot issue to school board 

“The Delaware Tribe is committed to the education of communities in support of our culture,” KillsCrow said….

Continue reading