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Chapter Two Living Traditions in Times of Turmoil: Meniolagomekah While contacts between Lenapes, now called Delawares, and colonists increased after the turn of the century, daily lives and experiences among Indians remain as elusive as ever. Colonial records are rife with minutes from councils held between various Indians and white diplomats. Few Indians are named and almost all of them seem to have been men. No wonder historians have concluded that diplomacy “which like hunting and war involved travel through the woods, was by definition a man’s realm,” while women stayed in the clearing, around the houses. Even though women were present—and sometimes quite active—at the seemingly endless, seemingly all-male conferences at meetinghouses in Philadelphia, Albany, Easton, or Lancaster, in order to catch more than a glimpse of them we need to turn our gaze to the Indian villages that dotted the landscape all across Pennsylvania . Reports on village life are scarce and apart from captivity narratives few others exist in English. However, Moravian missionaries left ample records of their lives among the Delawares and Mahicans and offer some information about everyday life in these villages. Baptismal records also reveal something of the relationships and realities that fashioned Delaware life in the eighteenth century. Such sources help our understanding of Delaware experiences and options, as well as concerns of both men and women during this period and are especially rich for the Delaware town of Meniolagomekah during the 1750s.1 Meniolagomekah was a village with a resident white missionary, but it was not a Christian town such as nearby Gnadenhütten. Gnadenhütten had been founded in 1746 on a piece of land 30 miles from the Moravian center at Bethlehem. Two years earlier the German pietists had been ousted from their first mission at Shekomeko in New York as they had refused to take oaths of loyalty to either French or British administrations. Many Mahican and some Delaware converts followed them to Pennsylvania to the new town of Gnadenhütten. By 1752, some Meniolagomekah villagers had been 52 Chapter Two baptized, while others remained unconverted and they maintained extensive contacts with relatives, friends, and foes in other regions and villages. With Meniolagomekah as our focus, we discover that women were indeed present in the American woods every bit as much as men, and that to try to write a history of this period solely with a male cast of characters seriously distorts the picture of the life the Delawares faced and the choices they made in order to ensure survival. These are stories of real people who lived their lives in real time, but we know them only through the missionaries’ eyes and ears and interpretations of their hopes and fears. Most of the time we do not know what name or names they knew themselves by. Instead we might say that this is a story of pseudonyms. The names passed down to us through the centuries are mostly the names that missionaries used to designate baptized individuals. A Delaware woman, let us call her Naemi, and a Delaware man, let us call him Samuel, are two of the central actors of the following narrative. Shards of their life experiences and a tiny smattering of the words they spoke and listened to throughout their lives come to us through the pens of Bernhard Adam Grube, Johann Jacob Schmick, and others. Although the few sources that remain concerning their lives and words have been sifted through the minds of white men, Naemi and Samuel are very much capable of communicating something of themselves to us. The Moravian records offer a unique opportunity for grasping several aspects of the Delawares’ lives during this period. In this chapter we peruse these records to learn more about the yearly cycle of subsistence work and socializing, residence patterns and traveling, and leadership and internal conflicts, as well as the nature of the relationships with the missionaries and the limits to their diaries as sources. Augustus, Nathanael, Samuel, and Jonathan participated in negotiations and treaty talks with representatives of both the English provincial government and delegations from other Indian nations. But thanks to the Moravian archives they are not the only Delawares we know of, and these records show that treaty business is not the only condition determining the lives of the people in Meniolagomekah village . We also meet Josua and Anton, active in contacts with missionaries as well as in the lives of their families; Naemi as a...

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