The Delaware Indians: A History

This is an excellent history of the Lenape people and the trials they endured at the hands of European and American colonists over the centuries. It offers a detailed view of these relationships and uses primary source documents to tell the story - a very important factor in any true understanding of a culture. I do find, however,with the exception of the Hudson River Valley, that the Lenape northeast of the New York City area were not much of a focal point; unfortunately, this is the major focus of my research so I was a bit disappointed. However, the global view is well written and well documented and contributes to my knowledge of the tribe as a whole.

As a writer of Lenape fiction, I used a number of books for reference material. As a Lenape man who was raised off the reservation, I needed to find information that was not passed on to me as a child. I highly recommend this book for those who want an idea of our past and our future as a Lenape Nation

The Delaware Indians was the first book I read on the Lenape. ("Delawares" was the name given by European colonists to the Lenape people.) After reading many other books on the Lenape, Weslager's work remains the best book on the subject I've read. As striking as the exemplary research demonstrated in the book is its accessible style. Cleary Weslager took great pains to make the story of the relatively unknown Lenape people available to as wide an audience as possible. The book is a complete history of the Lenape, and its source material is oral traditions carried down by the Lenape, colonial records and writings, and 20th century records and personal narratives as well. Weslager also describes Lenape customs, ceremonies and beliefs. His description of the Lenape Big House Ceremony is fascinating. Weslager's accounts of the successive betrayals, deceptions and crimes of the European colonists and their American descendants track the disastrous trail of the Lenape from their original homeland to present day Oklahoma. Readers can easily sense that Weslager's sympathies for the Lenape people border on advocacy. Unsurprisingly, Weslager ends the book by describing the Lenape's attempt to receive compensation owed to them by the USA government for over 100 years. I highly recommend this book and others by Weslager as well.

I thought this book was perfect! I had a HUGE paper to write on the Lenni-Lenape/Delaware tribe and I couldn't find much information on them. I found this book, I bought it, I read it, I loved it, I wrote my paper using some information from it, and I got an A+ on my paper. I learned so much from this beautifully written book!

Weslager combines a flair for description with a scholarly tone to produce what is to date the most fair, accurate study of the Delaware Indians, or Lenni Lenape. Using historical, archealogical, anthropological, and ethnohistorical evidence, Weslager provides an almost complete history of this often neglected Indian tribe. This work is a must read for anyone interested in the early history of the mid-Atlantic region.