Native Americans and Pennsylvania, by Daniel K. Richter

Though brief, Richter’s narrative is detailed, bringing nuance to popular assumptions and misconceptions. It incorporates new knowledge, benefitting from advanced archaeological research and the rise of academic disciplines devoted to Native studies. From routes Indigenous peoples took into North America to Benjamin West’s idyllic depiction Penn’s Treaty with the Indians (1771), it reexamines things large and small, incorporating Indigenous voices and perspectives.

A continental journey

Ancestors of Native peoples crossed the Bering Strait from Asia thousands of years before the common era. Richter describes possible routes through what would become Canada and the Americas, including one along the Pacific coast and another east of the Rocky Mountains. The Pacific track, warmer and the only route available between 22,000 and 15,000 BCE, is now considered primary. The people who first inhabited Pennsylvania are thought to have migrated south, then east and north no later than 14,000 BCE. At that time, the future Pennsylvania was covered by glaciers.

For 15,000 years, people evolved with the landscape. They hunted, planted, fished, and developed cultures. By 1500, Pennsylvania’s three river systems, formed by melting glaciers, were each dominated by a Native group: the Monongahela in the southwest, the Conestoga in the center, and the Lenape in the east.

Nothing primitive about PA’s first inhabitants

“There was nothing simple or primitive” about early inhabitants, Richter writes. “Well-adapted material patterns endured for centuries, although a host of human languages, beliefs, and social practices—which left hardly an archaeological trace—no doubt came and went in each of the three riverine zones.”

The upper and lower Delaware watersheds were home to many small communities by the 16th century. Known as Lenapehoking, they were mostly autonomous, Richter says, “but they were united into loose regional political groupings that shared strong affinities of marriage, trade and language with one another ... kinship was primarily matrilineal.” Different dialects were spoken by Lenape north and south of the Delaware Water Gap.

Contact and conflict

For much of the 17th century, Native people in Pennsylvania’s interior had little to do with European arrivals. When contact occurred, however, European settlers brought diseases, such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, that hollowed out communities. But as Richter points out, “Microbes did not do the work alone; social disruptions, crops that failed because no one could tend them, warfare, and, over time, direct and indirect pressures of European colonialism were partners in the devastation.”

Conflicts were not strictly European versus Native: exploring nations competed for territory and access, while their Indigenous counterparts vied for tradable goods and access to European markets. And goods flowed both ways: evidence shows that Indigenous people had access to European products as early as the 1550s through Native trading networks.

Peace gives way to fraud and anger

At first, the future Pennsylvania was relatively nonviolent because of William Penn’s Quaker beliefs and the fortuitous timing of his arrival—during a period of relative calm between Natives and Europeans, but the Lenape were also responsible. Richter writes that the peaceful relations that distinguished Lenapehoking principally stemmed from the fact that the real danger to the Lenape had come from Indigenous rivals to the west, rather than from what were then small groups of European settlers. For the next 70 years, while Quakers remained in power, Pennsylvania had no formal military and relied on diplomacy to build relations and settle disputes.

Things changed after Penn’s death in 1718 (he had returned to England in 1701). His sons, facing significant debt and lacking William and Hannah Penn’s commitment to Quakerism, “turned to legal chicanery and outright fraud to acquire the Indigenous land titles they so desperately needed.” As the middle of the century approached, Native resentments “seethed” while Europeans continued to pour in. Land agent James Logan was central in orchestrating these efforts.

In addition to European mendacity, Richter points to a fundamental misunderstanding that added to friction between the groups. The Lenape did not view themselves as owning the Earth, and therefore viewed a land sale as something more akin to a lease, allowing “buyers” to live on and cultivate acreage. Penn and other Europeans saw a land sale as a transfer of ownership that freed acreage from any Native claim, enabling purchasers to divide and resell it.

Racism intensifies

By the middle of the 18th century, Euro-Pennsylvanians and Indigenous people generally regarded each other as enemies. Quakers, however, continued to defend and advocate for Native groups.

In the War of Independence, Richter writes, “most Native Americans initially tried to stay out of the quarrel.” Local leaders struggled to decide what was best for their own communities’ circumstances. Today’s historians are only now rediscovering “the profoundly anti-Indian themes that ran through the revolutionary movement,” including in Pennsylvania.

In the 19th century, Native peoples were driven farther and farther west. Two presidents, William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson, were elected, in part, on the strength of reputations as “Indian fighters”. The US Census, initiated in 1790, began to include the Indigenous population, but the effort was minimal, casting doubt on results.

What every American should know

Moving into the present, Richter sketches 20th-century increases in Native cultural awareness and activism, and the accompanying struggle for recognition of Indigenous presence, contributions, and heritage, including their brutal resettlement and attempted erasure as the new nation expanded.

Census counts have become more accurate, thanks to Native self-identification on census documents. In 2020, Pennsylvania reported 31,052 Native inhabitants. Also significant was the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, permitting groups to petition the federal government for the protection and return of ancestral human remains, funerary and sacred objects, and cultural items to lineal descendants.

Swift and detailed, Native Americans and Pennsylvania leads readers from the deep glacial past to the social justice present, illuminating events every American should know about.

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