“When Lenape scouts first sighted TheHalf Moon with Hudson at its helm, they noted that the captain wore red, a color that signified vitality and warfare, joy and anger. According to [John] Heckewelder, they marveled, ‘He, surely, must be the great Mannitto, but why should he have a white skin?’
Here Heckewelder, writing two centuries later, was projecting his contemporary racial sensibility onto their first impressions. It seems unlikely (as the historian Evan Haefeli has argued) that to Lenape eyes the strangers would have appeared 'white,’ the color of wampum shells and flint. The Dutch, when they controlled the New Netherlands, did not identify themselves as 'white’ but as 'Christians.’ And the Lenape’s own early accounts fixate on the peculiar hairiness of the Europeans rather than their skin color—to a society of men who did not grow beards, the new arrivals seemed more akin to otters or bears. Or else the Lenape commented on their eyes, for where they lived, only wolves had blue or green irises.
According to records from the early eighteenth century, natives and new arrivals in the English colonies rarely remarked on skin color or identified one another in such terms. Yet within a few decades, the division of peoples into a trinity of white, black, and red had become common. Barbados, England’s first plantation colony, was the first to witness the transition from 'Christian’ to 'white,’ as the colonists sought to separate themselves from their slaves, the islanders, and the small but growing caste of people with mixed ancestry. Like a wind, whiteness travelled north and into the Carolinas, as colonialists from Barbados emigrated there. It took a decade to reach the northeast.
Around the early 1720s, indigenous people in the South began to appropriate the label 'red.’ Long before it became a slur, it was a term of empowerment, evoking ardor and prowess in war. When Carl Linnaeus, in 1740, classified the peoples of the New World as 'red’ in his Systema Naturae, red skin became enshrined as a scientific category, though it is no more grounded in biology than in the air.
The Lenape, for their part, called the sunburned strangers Shuwanakuw. The modern Delaware-English dictionary defines this as 'white person.’ Yet Shuwanakuw derives not from the word for white, waapii, but from shuwanpuy, meaning 'ocean, sea, or saltwater.’ White people were those who had emerged from the sea.”
Nora Thompson Dean was a Lenape Native American traditionalist. Her birth name was Wenjipahkeehlehkwe which roughly translates to “touching leaves woman.“She was a native speaker of the Unami language and dedicated herself to the preservation of the language and her culture.
Nora was educated in Oklahoma public schools and graduated high school as salutatorian. Since she was raised according to Native customs, she appreciated and taught them. She instructed Lenape religious ceremonies, social functions, dances, craftwork, herbal medicines, and language. Dean became an influential member of her community. She received awards for her crafts work and met with government representatives for Native preservation. She lectured at various universities and recorded Lenape language lessons. An Oklahoma governor declared Nora an ambassador of goodwill.
On This Day in Herstory, November 9th 1764, Mary Campbell, a ‘captive’ of the Lenape tribe during the French and Indian War, was turned over to British troops.
Mary Campbell was born c. 1747, and her family was Scotch-Irish immigrants to the American colonies. On May 21st 1758, when she was 10, Campbell was abducted from her town of Penn’s Creek, Pennsylvania. Her captors were a group of Lenape, a Native American tribe also known as the Delaware. During her captivity she stayed in the household of the principal chief of the Lenape.
During the French and Indian War, and other conflicts that arose between the colonists and the Native Americans some Native American tribes, specifically those living in the Midwest, would raid white settlements with some frequency. The Native people were looking to defend themselves against the violent Anglo-American encroachment of their land; and occasionally the result of raiding these colonial settlements was the taking of captives. Some of these captives were killed, but many of them were adopted into the tribe; it is now thought that the Native Americans may have done this to supplement their dwindling numbers. For decades the Natives Americans faced epidemics spread by the Europeans, and constant war with the colonists themselves, all of this culminated in a struggling population. Women and children were the most likely to be adopted into the tribe, because they were thought to be easier to assimilate to the traditional customs and lifestyles of the Native American; routinely, after several years in the tribe, they allowed their adoptive members to remain with the tribe, or return to their previous culture.
In 1764 British military pressure of the Native Americans in Ohio forced them to turn over their white captives. On November 9th 1764, Campbell was handed over to the troops, and she was one of 60 former captives who were handed over to the British, she would have been about 17 years old at the time having spent over 6 years with the Lenape. She was initially deeply distraught about being separated from her Native American family, and it is estimated that of the 60 people returned to the British at least half of them (probably including Campbell) tried to escape and return to the captors; this behaviour deeply confused and troubled the British troops.
After her return to Pennsylvania, in 1770 Campbell married Joseph Willford, and together they had seven children: five sons and two daughter. Mary Campbell died in 1801.
