Resumo de Os Lenapé e suas lendas

The 8 key ideas

1. Key idea 1 · free to read

   The Lenape belong to a vast Algonkin family

   Brinton opens with a wide map. Around 1500 to 1600, he says, the related tribes called Algonkins held the Atlantic coast from the Savannah River to the Strait of Belle Isle. The Crees lived by Hudson Bay, the Chipeways around Lake Superior, and the Miamis on the prairies. In the east stood the Micmacs, Mohegans, Lenape, Nanticokes, Powhatans and Shawnees. All their dialects came from one older speech.

   Where did that speech begin? Morgan pointed to the Columbia River. Hale pointed east, to Hudson Bay and Labrador. Brinton sides with Hale, for reasons of language. Blackfoot, the dialect farthest west, is the most worn down. Cree, in the north, has simple roots and clear grammar, so it looks closest to the parent tongue.

   Surrounded by the Algonkins lived the Iroquois. The Five Nations held central New York. The Lenape called the Iroquois speakers Mengwe, which the English bent into Mingo. They remembered the Cherokees as enemies until the Lenape stepped in as peacemakers.

   To understand the Lenape, first learn who stood around them.

2. 2

   Eastern tribes formed a loose confederacy under the Delawares

   Brinton shows that the Algonkins north of the Potomac saw themselves as kin.

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3. 3

   The Lenape had three subtribes and a peaceful government

   The Lenape called themselves by that name, which Brinton reads as our men, meaning the original people.

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4. 4

   Light, the four winds and the soul shaped Lenape belief

   Brinton rebuilds Lenape religion from missionary accounts, and finds it unlike the popular idea of a Good Spirit and a Bad Spirit.

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5. 5

   Language and missionaries preserved the Delaware tongue

   Brinton turns next to the speech of the Lenape, and to the few people who wrote it down.

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6. 6

   The Lenape were called women, and then moved west

   One of the book's strangest stories is how the Lenape became women.

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7. 7

   Lenape myths and migration stories describe origins

   Brinton gathers the fragments of Lenape myth.

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8. 8

   The Red Score is tested, then judged genuine in its way

   The Walam Olum comes to us through Constantine Rafinesque, a restless naturalist born in Constantinople in 1783.

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