Jeremy Johnson spoke about Lenape culture, beliefs and historical misinformation about Lenape nations.
Jeremy Johnson was born and raised in Oklahoma, but when he first encountered a tulip poplar tree — native to the East Coast — he quickly recognized it from the beadwork and ribbon work of his Lenape tribe.
“There’s an immediacy to our histories that lives within us,” Johnson said to an audience of 50 students and faculty on Wednesday at the inaugural speaker event of Lafayette College’s Indigenous Studies program. “It doesn’t matter that it happened 300 years ago; it still has the effect as if it happened yesterday.”
Johnson is the cultural education director of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. The event featured a thorough discussion of Lenape land, pre-contact Lenape life, tribal structure, belief system and language dialects. He is the first member of the Lenape Nation to speak at Lafayette College.
Johnson began the event by speaking for a full minute in Lenape, then translating what he said into English.
“Must be my accent!” he joked.
He then taught the audience how to say “Hello” in Lenape, a language that he emphasized was difficult to learn. Luckily for the audience, “Hello” in Lenape is just “Hè,” pronounced like “Hey.”
Following an overview of Lenape life, Johnson began a discussion of what he called “the flash,” or the first period of contact with non-Lenape, white colonizing populations.
“This history is very complicated,” Johnson said. “Many people who were not Lenape were writing down these histories and encounters with our peoples.”
Johnson discussed dispelling stereotypes about Lenape society and emphasized that the knowledge possessed by Lenape peoples arises from many years of knowledge and research, not from a falsely mystified source.
“I like to kind of talk about how we were not this mystical society,” Johnson said. “The knowledge gained that we shared and had come to know was based on observation and experimentation. We knew when the shad were going to run because we observed it — observed it for many, many years.”
This event was born out of the new Indigenous Studies program, as part of “establishing a more formal relationship with the federally recognized Lenape nations,” anthropology professor Andrea Smith said.
She said that she invited Johnson after hearing him speak at Ursinus College last year.
“I liked how he highlighted the history,” said Olivia Wund ‘28, who attended the event. “I’ve never heard it from a Lenape person’s perspective, so it was really powerful to hear.”
Wund said she found the event enlightening and felt it allowed her to reflect on the meaningful nature of Lenape history.
Johnson had tears in his eyes by the event’s conclusion.
“There’s a lot more to say, there’s a lot more to do,” Johnson said at the end of the talk. “As a Lenape man growing up in Oklahoma, I never thought I’d be standing in front of you talking about my family, my people.”