Who Are the Lenape (Delaware) People? The Tribe's Own Account

The Delaware Tribe of Indians, a federally recognized tribe of the Lenape people headquartered in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, explains on its website that "Delaware" is a name Europeans gave to the people living along the Delaware River — while the people call themselves Lenape (len-NAH-pay), meaning something like "The People." That distinction between an outside label and a self-name is the starting point for understanding who the Lenape are, according to the tribe's own history.

Where the name "Delaware" comes from

The tribe's account traces the name in two steps:

• The river was named after Lord de la Warr, the governor of the Jamestown colony.
• The name Delaware was then applied to the people who lived along that river — and later came to be applied to almost all Lenape people.

So the name most familiar in English is a colonial place-name, not the people's own word for themselves.

Language and identity

The Lenape language belongs to the Algonquian language family. In that language, the people call themselves Lenape, which the tribe translates as something like "The People."

This is the core identity claim on the page: the community's own name for itself is Lenape, and "Delaware" is the externally applied term that stuck.

Early contact with Europeans

According to the tribe, its ancestors were among the first Indians to come into contact with Europeans — Dutch, English, and Swedish settlers — in the early 1600s.

That timing matters for how the tribe frames its later history: the Lenape were encountering European powers from the earliest period of colonization, not after the process was already underway.

The "Grandfather" tribe and the peacemaker role

The Delaware were called the "Grandfather" tribe, the website explains, because other tribes respected them as peacemakers — they often served to settle disputes among rival tribes. The same account notes they were also known for fierceness and tenacity as warriors when they had to fight, but that they preferred a path of peace with Europeans and other tribes.

Treaties and land: a difference in understanding

The tribe describes a fundamental gap in how land transactions were understood:

• Many early treaties and land sales signed with Europeans were, in the Lenape's minds, more like leases.
• The early Delaware had no idea land was something that could be sold — the land belonged to the Creator, and the Lenape were only using it to shelter and feed their people.
• When newly arrived, "poor, bedraggled" people came off ships needing a place to live, the Lenape shared the land. They received a few token gifts for their kindness, but in the European mind those gifts were the purchase price.
• The Delaware signed the first Indian treaty with the newly formed United States government on September 17, 1778.

This section is the tribe's own framing of why treaty and land-sale records can be read very differently depending on whose understanding of land is applied.

What the site offers beyond history

The homepage also carries current tribal activity, which is useful if you came looking for services rather than history:

If you want to go further

The tribe's page ends its history section with "learn more," pointing to a fuller account. For anyone researching Lenape identity, the practical takeaway is to expect two vocabularies in the sources you read — Delaware in colonial and government records, Lenape in the community's own usage — and to treat land-sale language in early treaties as contested rather than settled.