Over the course of its history, North America has been home to many different animals, including humans. The first humans to call North America home came over thousands of years ago from Russia. They traveled the earth looking for animals to provide meat and clothing. One of these groups contained the ancestors of the Delaware. The Delaware Nation was one of the first nations to encounter English settlers. Their story of triumph, hardship, and how they overcame obstacles to remain one of the standard communities today is told here.

Native Americans first came to settle North America many thousands of years ago. The Cree is an ancient group that chose to set up their communities in Quebec, Canada. Their ancestors passed down their history from one generation to the next through word of mouth. As years passed, the Cree built communities and faced many challenges. This is the story of the Cree nation, how they survived hardships and obstacles, and continued into the present day.

The Delaware people are a group of Native Americans also known as the Lenape people. Their name comes from the Delaware River valley, which is where many of them lived before Europeans came to North America. Readers explore these and many other facts about the Delaware’s history, culture, and modern life. The detailed, accessible text is accompanied by both historical images and full-color photographs. Readers are given a focused look at the essential social studies curriculum topic of Native American history and culture while learning about the Delaware people.

Over the course of its history, North America has been home to many different animals, including humans. The first humans to call North America home came over thousands of years ago from Russia. They traveled the earth looking for animals to provide meat and clothing. One of these groups contained the ancestors of the Delaware. The Delaware Nation was one of the first nations to encounter English settlers. Their story of triumph, hardship, and how they overcame obstacles to remain one of the standard communities today is told here.

This collection of twenty-two Delaware Indian stories has long been sought out both by scholars and individuals. Beyond the lessons, the book introduces the richness of the original Delaware language to an English-speaking audience: four of these legends have been retranslated into the Delaware language by native Delaware speakers. Readers will find line-by-line translations that reveal the eventual transformation of a transliterated Delaware text into an English-language story.

Seventeenth-century Indians from the Delaware and lower Hudson valleys organized their lives around small-scale groupings of kin and communities. Living through epidemics, warfare, economic change, and physical dispossession, survivors from these peoples came together in new locations, especially the eighteenth-century Susquehanna and Ohio River valleys. In the process, they did not abandon kin and community orientations, but they increasingly defined a role for themselves as Delaware Indians in early American society. Peoples of the River Valleys offers a fresh interpretation of the history of the Delaware, or Lenape, Indians in the context of events in the mid-Atlantic region and the Ohio Valley. It focuses on a broad and significant period: 1609-1783, including the years of Dutch, Swedish, and English colonization and the American Revolution. An epilogue takes the Delawares' story into the mid-nineteenth century. Amy C. Schutt examines important themes in Native American history—mediation and alliance formation—and shows their crucial role in the development of the Delawares as a people. She goes beyond familiar questions about Indian-European relations and examines how Indian-Indian associations were a major factor in the history of the Delawares. Drawing extensively upon primary sources, including treaty minutes, deeds, and Moravian mission records, Schutt reveals that Delawares approached alliances as a tool for survival at a time when Euro-Americans were encroaching on Native lands. As relations with colonists were frequently troubled, Delawares often turned instead to form alliances with other Delawares and non-Delaware Indians with whom they shared territories and resources. In vivid detail, Peoples of the River Valleys shows the link between the Delawares' approaches to land and the relationships they constructed on the land.