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  • Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians
  • Christina Snyder (bio)
Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians. By Amy C. Schutt. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 264. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.)

In Peoples of the River Valleys, Amy Schutt traces the history of the Native peoples of the Delaware and Hudson valleys—most of whom came to be called "Delawares" or "Lenapes"—from 1609 to 1783. Although Schutt ranges broadly, she focuses mostly on how this group built and maintained alliances. Throughout this period, the Delawares forged ties with their neighbors in Pennsylvania and, more successfully, with other Indian groups. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Delawares secured a lofty reputation among Indian groups as great alliance builders and peacemakers; in the kinship-based parlance of Native diplomacy, [End Page 783] they were "grandfathers." Drawing upon careful archival research, including German-language Moravian sources, Schutt demonstrates how these disparate "peoples of the river valleys" became the grandfathers of eastern North America.

The first portion of the book introduces the Native people who inhabited the Delaware and Hudson valleys in the seventeenth century and their early interactions with Europeans. According to Schutt, these people based their identity on kin and community ties, bonds reinforced by allegiance to leaders and participation in rituals. Schutt hints at the importance of the Delawares' early relationship to the Iroquois, a powerful confederacy of five (later six) nations. Although this line of inquiry is underdeveloped, it seems plausible that the Delawares' sixteenth-century dealings with the Iroquois equipped them with the diplomatic skills that facilitated later alliances. Schutt, however, is more interested in how the Delawares dealt with European colonization. She argues that they "responded to the warfare, epidemic disease, and other tumultuous events of the seventeenth century by developing and using networks of trade and other forms of exchange, creating new alliances, sharing territories, and in some cases merging with other groups" (31).

Although initially peaceful, the relationship between the Delawares and the colony of Pennsylvania soured: Squatters invaded Delaware country, squabbles between settlers and Indians turned violent, the disgraceful "Walking Purchase" outraged Delaware leaders. In response, Delawares employed several strategies that they had developed in early encounters with Europeans. Many moved. Some formed new multiethnic Indian communities. Others found a new home among the Moravians who settled the forks of the Delaware. As Schutt demonstrates, the Delawares found surprising strength in this diaspora, for it enabled them to build power-conferring alliances with a diverse array of peoples. As Delaware leaders constructed ties of fictive kinship with host communities, they consciously carved out a role for the Delaware people as peacemakers and alliance builders. In fact, before they became "grandfathers," Delaware leaders called their people "women." As opposed to Indian men, who were often warriors, Native women made peace. By depicting themselves as nonviolent mediators, the Delawares forged ties with groups from the Great Lakes to New England.

Despite the efforts of pacific chiefs like White Eyes, neutrality became an untenable path by the late eighteenth century. As Schutt demonstrates, the tensions surrounding the American Revolution "sabotaged [End Page 784] Delaware attempts to find consensus and come together as a people" (150). Many of the Delawares' allies sided with the British. Moreover, the Delawares—themselves a coalition of diverse peoples—took different paths during the conflict. Schutt concludes that the Delawares' chain of alliances, so carefully wrought through decades of diplomacy, fractured under the weight of war. Her epilogue, however, makes it clear that those bonds were damaged but not broken, for the Delawares continued to call on their old allies during the conflicts of the 1790s and thereafter as they faced forced removal from their homeland.

Although Schutt illuminates the history of this important group in early America, her book offers too little interpretation. Often obfuscated, the overall argument—that alliance-building defined the Delawares and enabled them to survive as a people—comes through most clearly in chapter 5. Also, she does not explain her decision to focus on the period from 1609 to 1783, and while I applaud her epilogue, which briefly follows Delaware migrations from the Revolution...

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