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During
nearly twenty years, we have been privileged to study historic Native
American remnant groups in Delaware, usually as part of the Delaware Department
of Transportation cultural resource management program. Most of
our work has been concentrated in Duck Creek, Little Creek, Kenton,
and West Dover hundreds, the north half of Kent
County. The
people of this area, now called Lenape, belong to the same stock
as the people of southern Sussex
County now called Nanticoke,
and the people in Cumberland County, New
Jersey, who are now called Nanticoke-Lenape.
Historical
documents indicate that Northern
Kent County
was called Mitsawokett during the settlement period, and that the
people here were part of the Cohansey who lived on the east side
of Delaware Bay. Historical documents
indicate that the area now known as central Delaware
was the south limit of Lenape territorial claims.
Whatever
their descendants call themselves today, the tribes who met the
first European settlers have experienced many changes during four
centuries. In any Native American community on Delmarva or in New Jersey today, no individual can claim descent
exclusively from one seventeenth-century tribe or another. This
is why the sponsors of this meeting call themselves Nanticoke-Lenape.
After
the middle of the eighteenth century, Delaware did not recognize
the existence of any Native American people within its boundaries.
The legislature even made an official statement to the effect that
there were no Indians in the colony. Throughout the coastal plain,
at the beginning of our federal period, there were a few scattered
remnant communities of Native American people. And of that scattered
population, only a small portion was recognized by their neighbors
as Indian tribes. In the minds of the general population, all the
Indians were out west. So began the period of invisibility, when
the Native population disappeared from the historical record.
For
purposes of the census and enforcement of discriminatory laws, race
in America
has been defined, throughout the nineteenth century and much of
the twentieth, by the subjective opinion of white record keepers.
These officials frequently were ignorant of the nuanced meanings
of race terminology and often were uninterested in ethnic origins.
To some record-keepers, every nonwhite was "negro." Sometimes
Indian people would be identified as "mulatto," an ambiguous
term applied to all light-skinned nonwhites and probably to a few
Mediterranean whites as well. Citizens of Indian origin were enumerated
in the federal census together with African Americans under the
classification of "freepersons of color." Some Indians
were classified as white; especially if they were financially well
off. The 1800 census of Delaware did not identify
any person as an Indian, but did identify several Indian families
as white. In some years the tax assessors identified Indian-descended
families as "mulattoes" and reserved the term "negro"
for persons of African descent, regardless of mixture. In other
years, every nonwhite was classed as "negro." Race classification
depended entirely upon the tax collector's perception.
Official
silence concerning ethnicity during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries has complicated the task of making historical racial or
cultural identifications. After the Civil War, when free public
education was gradually extended to nonwhites, a group of citizens
protested against being included in the "negro" school
system. Instead, they eventually persuaded the state to create
"moor" or "Indian" schools at both Indian River and Cheswold. This was the beginning of the
struggle for modern Indian recognition in Delaware.
It
is important to remember that the historical experience of East
Coast Indian populations is very different from the history of their
western cousins. In the west, where the Army was tasked with controlling
Native American populations, there was no question as to who was
Indian. Mere presence in a population conferred ethnic and tribal
identity, even though many of the people in the tribes were of mixed
origin.
In
the west, in Indian country, you knew who was an Indian because
the Army and later the Bureau of Indian Affairs kept a list. Here
in the east, there were no official lists of Indians, because the
Indians did not officially exist. In the west, historians and genealogists
can determine who was an Indian simply by presence on a government
inventory. In the east, the identification process is exactly the
reverse. We must first identify the community, and then identify
individuals within that community who can be documented as Indians.
It's easy to walk into a group of Delaware
or New Jersey Indians and say that these people look like Indians,
but it's another matter entirely to prove that they are a coherent
group of related Native people who have always been a separate community.
If
we can show that over the years, certain individuals were identified
as Indians by impartial outside observers, we can logically assert
that their relatives constituted an Indian community, or band. By
then defining the band of which these obviously Indian people were
members, we can with some confidence demonstrate that the community
was an Indian band. Throughout three centuries Native American families
knew who they were. They stuck together. They intermarried. The
three bands of people in Indian River, Cheswold, and Cumberland County, composed a single population within
which people routinely circulated. They also maintained regular
contact with other Native American communities. In the 1820s, for
example, a young man from Cheswold went out to Peru,
Indiana,
to live a while with the Lenape emigrants out there. I'm told that
a Lenape community still exists in that part of Indiana.
In
order to document the Native American nature of the community, we
have employed genealogy, with the able assistance of a corps of
volunteers organized by Betty and Ray Terry, proprietors of the
Mitsawokett web site. Thanks to the efforts of Betty and Ray, we
now have a database that can be used to demonstrate the continuity
of Native American identity within these related families. Now let's
examine some of the documentation through time.
When
the Indian John Puckham was baptized in 1682, he became a "mulatto"
and married Jone Johnson, also a "mulatto". A George
Puckham was among the "Indians" named in the prosecutions
of the Winnesoccum "conspiracy" of 1742, which was the
beginning of the end of organized Indian tribes on Delmarva. Soon
after Winnesoccum, the traditional people moved away, while others
blended into the general population. Members of the Puckham family
moved to Kent County, and in 1815, a later George Puckham was named
in an estate settlement of the Durham
family.
So
our eastern searches for documentation must begin with genealogical
research, family by family, until we have a picture of community
ethnicity. The necessary records are, surprisingly abundant. The
name Francisco or Sisco appears in many Native American communities.
One Abraham Sisco was among the Nanticoke who addressed the Pennsylvania
governor in 1760, while the Nanticoke
were living in the Susquehanna valley. Descendants of documented
Francisco or Sisco people are living today in all three communities.
In 1748, as the traditional Native tribal people were leaving Delmarva,
some stayed behind. One of these, apparently, was William Cambridge,
who patented part of the Askibinakansen Indian town in Worcester
County, Maryland.
It appears that Cambridge was a Native American, and perhaps was getting
a Maryland
title to the place where he already lived; only archaeology can
tell us more.
The
Coursey family is one of the few who can demonstrate direct descent
from the seventeenth-century Nanticokes. They descend from Tom Coursey, historic
chief of the Nanticoke Indians. Daniel and Nathan Norwood enlisted
in a Delaware military company in 1758. Nathan was
described in the muster roll as "brown" and Daniel was
described as "brown Indian." Their comrade, James Westcote,
was also described as "brown" but his occupation was given
as "Indian". This may have been the last official document
to recognize the existence of Indians in Delaware.
Gradually,
an awareness of Indian origins began to creep back into the public
records and the public consciousness. In 1827, Nathaniel Clark was
identified in seamen's protective papers as a "colored man
of Indian race". He was born in 1799 in Lewes and Rehoboth
Hundred and died in Broadkill Hundred about 1875. With his wife
Eunice Ridgeway, he had 15 children, some of whom left descendants
in the community today. In 1853, the passport application of James
Dean from Kent
County described him as being "of
Indian descent". The Dean family was some of the core members
of the Cheswold community. William Handsor, progenitor of that family
in Kent and Sussex counties, is supposed to have
been Indian or mixed-race, but the only reference to him as being
a "mulatto" dates from a period after his death in 1767.
His descendant, James Handsor, was described in an 1831 passport
application as having an "Indian complexion".
During
the thirty years leading up to the Civil War, increasingly strict
laws restricted the activities of all nonwhites, including mulattoes.
A few well-off Indians challenged the restrictions in court, but
failed. Others moved to Canada
or to free states, including New Jersey,
Ohio, Michigan,
Iowa and Indiana. Some appear to have joined other Indian
nations on what was then the western border of the United States.
Some
families who moved away reclaimed their Indian identity in their
new homes. While their cousins in Delaware
and New Jersey
were still being called "mulattoes," the emigrants could
identify themselves as Indians. In the 1871 census of the province of Ontario,
a farmer named Benjamin Sammons was identified as Indian, born in
the United States, probably Delaware. William LaCount, a boot maker, died
in Brooklyn in 1875. He was described
as an Indian in the death record. His parents were Joseph and Mary
LaCount, who had lived in Philadelphia,
but were originally from Kent
County, Delaware. Sometimes we see in the documents
a record of indecision about ethnic identity during the period of
Indian invisibility. In 1880, in Michigan,
John W. Norwood, listed as white, married Maggie Simons or Sammons,
who was listed as French and Indian though she was born in Ontario
of Delaware-born parents. When Franklin Perkins, a descendant of
the Dean family of Delaware, was
born in Romulus,
Michigan, in 1872, his race was listed as "Indian"
on his birth certificate. The Perkins family was part of a large
colony of Delaware people who had moved to Michigan
and nearby parts of Canada.
William Cambridge, his wife Mary Dean, and their daughter Josephine,
were identified in the 1880 census as "Indian" living
in Camden, New
Jersey. Mary's father was Jesse Dean of
Cheswold, Delaware.
In that same 1880 census, there were no Indians listed in Cumberland
County, New Jersey.
In Delaware, the same census listed
only three Indians, all in a single Wilmington household. The next year, the Delaware legislature allowed the community on Indian River to establish a separate school system, but
the legislators carefully avoided identifying the people as anything
but "a certain class of colored people." There still
were no official local Indians in Delaware, but they had
their own schools.
In
1892, a reporter for the Philadelphia Times visited Cheswold and
interviewed John Sanders, or Saunders, who was then eighty years
of age, born in 1811. His father was from Sussex. Sanders declared that his
people were Indians, descendants of the Lenape or Delaware nation. During his youth, he had
lived a time among the Lenape on the Wabash
River near Peru,
Indiana.
His wife was a Dean. At least a few of the Native American people
were ready to reclaim their identity publicly and proudly, on their
home turf. Noke Norwood, brother of Lydia Clark, was described in
1895 by Judge Fisher as being a "copper-colored" person
with features that were decidedly Indian. His sister, supposedly
a full-blooded Indian, testified that the Indian
River people were descended from mixed white and African
people who had married into the local Native population. Judge Fisher's
article on the history of the Moors, and his account of the Levin
Sockum case, was published in a newspaper in 1895 and later published
as a pamphlet by the Public Archives Commission. When Fred Morris
and Reba Miller were married in Sussex
County, Delaware,
in 1900, the marriage return emphatically declared that both were
Indians. The people had returned to the official record with their
true identity. Two years later, the Delaware
legislature passed a law allowing persons of Native descent, in
all three counties, to obtain official state credentials as Indians.
The age of the legally invisible Indian was over, but the struggle
for acceptance had just begun.
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