In December 1776, a Lenape leader named White Eyes traveled to Philadelphia and stood before the Second Continental Congress. He had not come to declare himself a revolutionary, and he had not come to pledge loyalty to King George III. He came to test a promise. By then, the Lenape had been taking the measure of European newcomers for more than 250 years, and the question in front of every Lenape community was not whether to leave the British Empire. It was: How do we remain who we are, on the land we know?
Jeremy Johnson, Cultural Education Director of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, joins us to explore the history of the Lenape and Delaware peoples and their experiences of the American Revolution.
About the Show
Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.
It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.
Episode Summary
Jeremy Johnson is the Cultural Education Director of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, a federally recognized tribe of the Lenape people headquartered in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He is Lenape, Shawnee, and Peoria, and he served as the tribe’s Assistant Chief before taking up his current role. A lifelong educator, he taught middle and high school English and coached before joining the tribe’s Cultural Education Department.
During our conversation, Jeremy reveals:
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- How Lenape traditions of diplomacy earned them the name “grandfathers” among Algonquian peoples
- Why the Walking Purchase cost the Lenape more than 1,500 square miles of their homeland
- What the September 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt promised the Delaware and how long that promise lasted
What You’ll Discover
- How the Lenape became known as the Delaware
- The six federally recognized tribal nations of Lenape people
- Where Lenape history begins, thousands of years before European contact
- Lenape traditions of diplomacy and the role of the Sakima
- Why other Algonquian peoples called the Lenape their grandfathers
- First contact with the Dutch at New Amsterdam
- How the sale of Manhattan has been misremembered
- The Walking Purchase and the runners Pennsylvania hired
- Lenape experiences of the Seven Years’ War
- The 1758 Treaty of Easton and removal west of the Appalachian Mountains
- Neolin’s teachings and Lenape participation in Pontiac’s War
- American appeals for Lenape neutrality at Fort Pitt in 1775
- White Eyes before the Continental Congress in December 1776
- The 1778 Treaty of Fort Pitt and the promise of a fourteenth state
- How Delaware people are marking the 250th anniversary of American independence
Links to People, Places, and Publications
Time Warp Question
What do you think might have happened if the United States had invited Native nations to form an Indigenous state within the United States? Do you think Native nations would have joined this state, and what do you think the United States would look like today if that fourteenth state existed?
Complementary Episodes
🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canandaigua
🎧 Episode 286: Elections in Early America: Native Sovereignty
🎧 Episode 323: American Expansion and the Political Economy of Plunder
🎧 Episode 397: Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
🎧 Episode 449: Stealing America: Indigenous Enslavement & the American Revolution
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