Throwback Thursday, November 21 2024: Honoring National Native American Heritage Month

In honor of National Native American Heritage Month, we are highlighting several books related to local Native American groups from our library’s Local History Collection throughout the month of November. This week we are looking at Mark Raymond Harrington’s 1938 work Indians of New Jersey: Dickon among the Lenape.

Mark Raymond Harrington’s 1938 publication Indians of New Jersey: Dickon among the Lenape diverts slightly in writing style from the conventional history books written at this time, but it is no less informative when describing the culture and customs of the Lenape people, who inhabited Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and parts of the lower and mid-Hudson River Valley. Harrington’s interest in Native American life began when his family moved from Michigan to Seattle, where he visited the camps of the Coast Salish peoples. In high school Harrington and his family relocated across the country to Mount Vernon, New York. There he became an apprentice archaeologist after F.W. Putnam, then head of the Anthropology Department at the American Museum of Natural History, became impressed with the Native American artifacts the high school student was finding along the banks of the Hudson River. This apprenticeship would lead to Harrington being accepted to Columbia University, where he would study under noted anthropologist Franz Boas, before he eventually settled in Los Angeles for what would become curator of archaeology at the Southwest Museum, a post he would hold from 1928 until his retirement in 1964.

Harrington’s Indians of New Jersey was written in the years following his discoveries of Pueblo, and “Basketmaker” sites in the Nevada, but is based on work he conducted at excavations in New Jersey and New York while still an apprentice archaeologist. The author relied on archaeological, as well as interviews he conducted with living Lenape peoples thirty years prior, to describe the everyday lives of the Lenape and Delaware before the arrival of Europeans. The author also consulted three scholars, who were Native American, during the preparation of the book: Ruth E. Parks, Waendanakwe’now “Boughs-Touching-One-Another”, a Lenape from Oklahoma, verified and corrected the Lenape words included in the text, F.M. Parker, Ganundai’youh “Distant Village”, a Seneca, helped with library research, and Jasper Hill, Wapigok’hos, “Big-White-Owl”, a Lenape from Canada, also assisted “in various ways”. 

Unlike a traditional history, Harrington’s work presents history in a narrative structure through the fictional account of a young boy “Dickon”, who is captured by a group of Lenape after his ship Ye Portsmouth Maide runs aground off the coast of present-day New Jersey. As a captive, the protagonist learns the ways of the Lenape beginning with menial chores and before learning hunting skills and ceremonial dances before he is eventually rescued by another English ship. The text is accompanied by pen and ink illustrations by Clarence Ellsworth, who drew from surviving artifacts kept at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation (a founding collection of the National Museum of the American Indian), and the American Museum of Natural History. The book also includes a full glossary of Lenape, or Delaware terms and text that explains the pronunciation of words.