In the beginning, religion was the foundation of Elmhurst life. The local Indians themselves were part of a great movement of peoples who believed that the “Great Spirit” had ordained them to this land. They were pilgrims before the Pilgrims.
The Lenape (also called the Delaware Indians) brought a collection of religious beliefs as their tribes moved northward into the New York City area. There may have been as many as 15,000 Indians in the five boroughs, “estimates very widely,” according to Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace in their history Gotham. Because they did not have writing and their oral tradition was not an unbroken transmission, we cannot be sure what they believed. Most of the Lenape ended up later residing in Canada, the Midwest, and Oklahoma. Today, there are about 16,000 Lenape living in Oklahoma. Most became Christians, and it is uncertain if the oral traditions recently recorded reflect the 17th-century religion.
It is pretty certain that the Lenape were the settlers in Queens before 1630, although the Dutch settlers called them by various names, and northern nomadic tribes may have passed through the area. Dutch sources name separate tribes usually by the place names of their residences, but it is probable that they were all branches of the Lenape. So, the major groups that were named as living in Queens were the Matinesock, the Rockaway, the Maspeth, and the Canarsie. The Lenape of America are divided by contemporary observers into three divisions with the Munsee possibly including the groups in Queens. Tribes were made up of clans who traced their origins through the mother’s line, each identified with an animal like “Turkey,” “Tortoise,” etc.
The most likely scenario is that small bands of the Lenape independently moved from west of the Mississippi River eastward and northward.
The Lenape were pilgrims to a strange new land of promise, a place of safety from persecution from the tribes that they were fighting. Sometime before 1818, several Lenape told ethnologist/missionary John Heckewelder that their scouts came back with reports that the East Coast was bountiful and lacked potential enemies. Their tribal leaders concluded, “this is to be the country destined for them by the Great Spirit, [and] they began to emigrate thither, as yet but in small bodies.” They believed that they were “highly favored” by the Great Spirit, Kishelemukong, who had created the world and given the bounty of a prosperous land.
Perhaps, the Lenape also saw the Europeans like themselves on a great pilgrimage from God. The evidence is historically much later and is found in an unpublished (until by Pritchard in 2007) letter said to be from Lenape Munsee chiefs to the United States President Zachary Taylor on March 29, 1849.
They recount a tale that “a Vision and Revelation” came to their ancestors on Manhattan about the coming of the Europeans. They expected, in fact, that God would be coming to them from the east in the direction of the sunrise to bring some new kind of good game animal. So, when Captain Henry Hudson set foot on the shore, they came out to greet the coming of God. However, he told them that he was not God “but that he was their brother,” long lost and with great joy “he had now arrived and found his brethren again.” However, the relationship between brothers almost immediately became a mixed blessing. So, too, when the Lenape traveled east to the New York City area, they met a situation fraught with problems.
They ran into the Iroquois, the native superpower of northeast America who were inspired by a prophetic movement to press their gospel and control down the Hudson River and the Atlantic coast.
This seems to be confirmed by subsequent events. The Iroquois (meaning, “the Only True Men” or “Rattlesnakes” to their enemies) required lesser tribes to pay them tribute and to defend their interests. (Modern Iroquois prefer the name “Haudenosaunee,” meaning “people who are building the longhouse,” which refers to their confederacy of tribes.) When the Lenape tribes in Queens sided with the Dutch in a war with the hope of breaking their bondage to their northern overlords, the Iroquois made a lightning strike and slaughtered a Lenape village in Queens-Brooklyn. So, the locals in Elmhurst were not likely Iroquois and more likely to be Lenape.
The various groups of Lenape didn’t necessarily see themselves as one great group of related people. Rather, each tribe had its own independent identity with a regular relationship with some other tribes and none at all with others. Their languages were of the Algonquian family, similar but not identical. It seems that the identity of “Lenape” as one large, related group developed only when encountering and coming into opposition with the Iroquois or the Europeans. Similarly, their religious beliefs were not unified into a common religion until developing along with their pan-tribal identity. Each tribe had its own set of religious beliefs, though there does seem to be some that were held in common and transmitted by religious ritual leaders. Our description of Elmhurst Lenape religion will focus on those beliefs that were likely held in common by all Lenape at that time.
The Dutch probably gave the place name “Maspeth” to the tribes in the Elmhurst area. The name derives from an Algonquian word “mespaetches” meaning “bad water place,” a description of the salty waters of Flushing Bay or the stagnant water of Newtown Creek. The area around Elmhurst-Maspeth was a regular campsite for the Indians. The first European settlers in the area landed on the banks of the creek. A key tribal trail ran down what is now Grand and Flushing Avenues in Maspeth and Elmhurst. The largest concentrations of Lenape in Queens were probably in what we call the Astoria and Fort Totten areas.
There were not many Indians in the area, maybe no permanent settlers. Western Queens was mainly an uninhabited hunting ground sometimes called Wandownack, meaning “fine land between the two streams,” referring to the East River and Flushing Bay.
