The Great Haudenosaunee-Lenape Peace of 1669: Oral Traditions, Colonial Records, and the Origin of the Delaware's Status as "Women"

Abstract

The Delaware Indians, known in their language as the Lenape, have a unique reputation as the only nation in the Americas—and perhaps the entire world—accorded the status of “women.” This unusual designation entered the surviving documentary record in notorious fashion at a conference held in Pennsylvania in 1742 between representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy (known in their language as the Haudenosaunee), the Lenape, and Pennsylvania to discuss the “Walking Purchase” that had recently deprived the Lenape of virtually all their remaining traditional territory. When the Lenape complained that they had been defrauded, an Onondaga spokesman for the Haudenosaunee by the name of Canasatego berated them into accepting the deal, saying, “We conquered you; we made Women of you”; and therefore the Lenape deferred to the decision of the Haudenosaunee.1 Ever since then, the Lenape’s designation as “women” (we do not know what the original Indigenous word was) has been a subject of fierce debate among both the Indigenous nations involved and their Anglo-American colonizers. Eighteenth-century sources indicate that the status had been conferred in the seventeenth century at a peace conference where the Haudenosaunee had symbolically wrapped the Lenape in a “petticoat,” conferring to them the status as “women.” From the outbreak of the Seven Years War to the conclusion of the Northwest Indian War in 1795, the Haudenosaunee made various efforts to remove that “petticoat,” but the Lenape resisted, proudly clinging to their symbolic female garment. The resulting debates