During the last decades of the 18th century, European settlers and the effects of the American Revolutionary War displaced most Lenape from their homelands [ 12 ] and pushed them north and west.
In the s, under the Indian removal policy, the U. The name Lenni Lenape originates from two autonyms, Lenni , which means "genuine, pure, real, original", and Lenape , meaning "real person" or "original person". When first encountered by European settlers, the Lenape were a loose association of closely related peoples who spoke similar languages and shared familial bonds in an area known as Lenapehoking , [ 1 ] the Lenape historical territory, which spanned what is now eastern Pennsylvania , New Jersey , Lower New York Bay , and eastern Delaware.
The tribe's common name Delaware comes from the French language. The British colonists began to call the Lenape the Delaware Indians because of where they lived. Swedish colonists also settled in the area, and Swedish sources called the Lenape the Renappi.
On the west side, the Lenape lived in several small towns along the rivers and streams that fed the waterways, and likely shared the hunting territory of the Schuylkill River watershed with the rival Iroquoian Susquehannock. The Stockbridge-Munsee Community has a 22,acre The Unami and Munsee languages belong to the Eastern Algonquian language group and are largely mutually intelligible.
Moravian missionary John Heckewelder wrote that Munsee and Unami "came out of one parent language. William Penn , who first met the Lenape in , said the Unami used the following words: "mother" was anna , "brother" was isseemus and "friend" was netap.
