Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey

Jean R. Soderlund, Professor Emerita of History at Lehigh University, has published several books and many articles regarding the Lenape Indians, the Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, women in the British colonies of America, and the enslavement of African Americans in the Middle Colonies. This accomplished scholar has combined these interests in her latest monograph, Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey. Informed by substantial research in archives and secondary literature, Soderlund examines the process by which Quaker colonization in West New Jersey engulfed Lenape life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, beginning in 1675.The Lenapes had already established protocols by which they had welcomed Swedes, Finns and Dutch in their portion of New Sweden. These “old settlers” (5) respected the rules of Lenape land tenure. The Indians were willing to share particular territories with the newcomers while maintaining autonomy over their lands. Tensions arose, certainly, when diseases of European origin ravaged the indigenous population—reducing it from 7,500 to 3,000 between the 1630s and 1670s—and when the settlers’ pigs and cattle destroyed Native sources of vegetal subsistence. If individual invaders overstepped their bounds, the Lenapes conducted limited military campaigns to keep them in their place. Nonetheless, a pattern of reconciliation and alliance—even some intermarriage—prevailed in the riverine fields and pine barrens of Lenapehoking (Lenape place), between the Delaware River and Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.While willing to share resources with the old settlers, however, the Lenapes mostly kept their cultural distance: resisting Christian evangelization, maintaining spiritual beliefs and practices in seclusion, even withholding the fulness of their Unami language from scrutiny, preferring instead to conduct diplomacy and trade for cloth, metal goods, guns, and alcohol, via a simplified pidgin. Above all, they insisted upon their sovereignty, and “their success was remarkable and distinctive” (18) among the Native peoples of the Atlantic coastlands in the 1600s.The English Quakers had other ideas about accommodation and usurpation. While eschewing military solutions so regularly employed by other European colonizers—the Society of Friends espoused pacifism as an expression of its Christian faith—“they apparently expected the Lenapes to cede all their land and depart, contrary to the Lenapes’ resolve to permit small numbers of colonists to establish homes” (5). Following the Duke of York’s conquest of New Netherland in 1664, English colonists entered Lenapehoking. They acquired hundreds of thousands of acres of Lenape land, speculating on their worth, advertising them back in England as an environment that “‘floweth with Milk and Honey’” (36). Lenape leaders who put their marks on these recorded deeds had no intent to sell their lands; their expectation was one of “shared possession” (47) under their own hegemony, with promises of annual gifts from the Quakers for the right of usufruct.Soderlund holds the Quakers in high esteem. They were people of high ideals, dedicated to “religious liberty, property rights, freedom from involuntary servitude, justice, and peace” (63) for men and women alike—at least in theory. They had a “professed commitment to nonviolence, equality of all people before God, and the golden rule to behave toward others as you wish to be treated” (136). At the same time, they bullied the Lenapes, cared little for the future of their communities, and assumed smugly that “God promoted Quaker colonization” (65) by delivering epidemics to the “‘Heathen’” Indians. Quakers concocted “propaganda” (73) that blamed Lenape misfortunes on their undisciplined use of alcohol, “rather than colonization” (73), per se. The author writes that Quakers were righteous in their “commitment to nonviolence despite their rapacity for land” (78), for which they felt no “remorse” (64).In chapters devoted to the Quaker record on women’s roles in society and slavery in the economy, Lenape experiences are largely—but not totally—submerged. The multifaceted activity of a Lenape woman, Ojroqua, is prominent throughout the book. Lenapes protested slave-holding among the Quakers, especially when Native Americans were the ones being enslaved. But by the middle of the 1700s, Lenapes were sinking beneath the waves of Quaker colonization. Lenape spokespersons, such as the leader Teedyuscung, recognized the “catastrophic” (134) nature of Quaker settlement. Lenapes tried to press the claim before New Jersey Indian commissioners for particular Native land ownership, to little avail, and they were largely dispossessed. In 1758 the Lenapes were granted the 3,000-acre “reservation” (135) of Brothertown, which was sold in 1802 when that Lenape community moved to New Stockbridge, New York. Other Lenape refugees moved under pressure to Ontario, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and other locales, a Lenape archipelago in mainstream North America.Many Lenapes, however, remained in New Jersey, “‘hiding in plain sight’ through centuries of discrimination and prejudice” (135). The Quaker minister John Woolman wrote in 1746, “‘The natives are gone from before us’” (136). Perhaps, from his perspective, but Lenapes “held on” (139)—it is not clear how—to enclaves in their aboriginal territory. As Soderlund describes it, “they avoided attention from whites as much as possible while protecting their families and identities through tribal churches” (139). By the late twentieth century they began to reassert their cultural heritage, and, in recent years, they were able to proclaim in West New Jersey—now known as South Jersey—“‘We are still here!’” (140).Separate Paths chronicles a narrative hardly surprising in American Indian history: from aboriginal subsistence and autonomy, to partial adjustments under pressures of colonialism, to losses of population and property, to legal ouster and diaspora, to survivals. This reader would like to know more about the details of New Jersey Lenape perseverance over the past two centuries, but that is apparently another story, for another time.

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