Celebrating the Lenapehoking Watershed in Word and Map
Last year on this day we published this post about a map depicting Philadelphia before European settlement, when it was part of what the indigenous people call Lenapehoking (Land of the Lenape). The map was created by Meg Lemieur, a Philadelphia artist, with help from Trinity Norwood, a member of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation of Southern New Jersey.
We recorded an interview with Trinity and Meg about their collaboration, but the post focused solely on Meg and her map. This year I want to focus on Trinity and her tribe and their view of the natural world, which is so different from that of the people who came here and displaced them— “displaced” being a mild word for the genocide the Europeans perpetrated on indigenous peoples, whether by the spread of diseases to which they had no immunity or by forced removals, warfare, and murder.
(see below)
“One way to look at the difference between the Lenape and European views is to think about stewardship versus dominion,” Trinity told us. “Europeans came to the Americas with this understanding of dominion, that the land was to be taken over by them to use however they saw fit. But Lenape tradition and understanding is based on stewardship. Not just Lenape people—this is common for indigenous people around the world. We believe that we are here to take care of the land. We see the land as an equal. We treat it with the same care that we would give a brother and a sister. And living in connection with the land, seeing it as an equal, shaped how we interacted with the land as well as the water.”
The bottom line in this world view, Trinity says, is this: “The world does not revolve around the people in the place. The people, the place, and everything living in that place—we’re all connected and trying to evolve together.”
This connection between humans and the world they live in is reflected in the Lenape creation story, in which the animals play an active role long before humans even come on the scene. As in the Biblical story of creation from the Book of Genesis, the higher power made the animals first. But in the Lenape story the animals help the higher power create a world—sometimes called Turtle Island—that humans can actually inhabit. “We are living on the back of the turtle that sacrificed himself for humans to live, which reinforces our idea that we’re all in this together,” Trinity says.
As with many stories in cultures dependent on oral transfer of knowledge, there are many versions of this creation tale. You can read several on this website, including one in which the “humble muskrat” is the hero.
And as promised at the top, here is the map, featuring Lenapehoking by a different name.
TITLE BLOCK Philadelphia when known as Conanquannock, “Grove of Tall Pines,”and as first seen by the white men, with Indian villages, Aboriginal names of localities, streams, and islands and their interpretation
DATE 1934
CREATORS Edward Cacchione and Bernard Lion for the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Funded by the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Depression-era job creation program.
MORE INFORMATION All the other copies of this map that I have seen are printed with no coloring, as in this version from the Library Company of Philadelphia. The hand coloring on the copy above was probably not done by the original artists.
SOURCE I’m not certain where this colored version comes from. I found a high-resolution version in my files for which no source was noted, but a little sleuthing indicates that it probably comes from the Penn Museum. The original is about 62 by 86 cm; the version present here is half the size and reduced in quality from the original 254 mb tif.