The name Lenape means "real person" or "original person," a construction seen in the endonyms of their Algonquian relatives across the Northeast. The second element of Lenapehoking, hoki, derives from the Proto-Algonquian word for "land" -- the same root found in the Cree word Nitaskinan and the Ojibwe word aki. The suffix -nk is locative, meaning "in" or "at." At the time of European contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Lenape homeland ran along the Atlantic coast, encompassing the river valleys, coastal plains, and ridgelines of what would become four states. They were relatives of the Algonquian nations whose territories extended from beyond the Saint Lawrence River through all of New England. A 1610 map shows the name Manahata on both sides of what was then called the Mauritius River.

European colonization depopulated the Lenape through disease and displacement, but their language proved more durable than their presence. Across the New York metropolitan area, Lenape words survive as the names of neighborhoods, waterways, and geographic features. Gowanus comes from the sachem of the Canarsee band who lived along the creek. Maspeth was a Rockaway band settlement along Maspeth Creek. Ossining derives from a local tribal name meaning "stone upon stone." In New Jersey, Kittatinny means "great hill" or "endless mountain." In Pennsylvania, the names grow even more evocative: Cocalico means "where the snakes collect in dens to pass the winter." Perkasie means "where the hickory nuts were cracked." Conshohocken, according to Nora Thompson Dean, means "elegant land." These are not relics. They are words spoken daily by millions of people who have inherited a Lenape geography without knowing it.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, European colonists settled across Lenapehoking. The Dutch purchased Manhattan in the transaction that became American legend -- though what the Lenape understood by that exchange remains debated. The concurrent introduction of Eurasian infectious diseases devastated Lenape populations, and colonial encroachment steadily eroded their control over the land. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States government forcibly removed the Lenape westward, ultimately to Oklahoma and other locations far from their ancestral home. The displacement was total. A people whose territory had encompassed the most densely developed corridor in North America were pushed to reservations a thousand miles away.

Today, Lenape nations control lands in Oklahoma (the Delaware Nation and the Delaware Tribe of Indians), Wisconsin (the Stockbridge-Munsee Community), and Ontario, Canada (the Munsee-Delaware Nation, the Moravian of the Thames First Nation, and the Delaware of Six Nations). They are not historical artifacts. They are living nations with governments, cultural programs, and members who maintain the Lenape language that named the places where twelve million people now live. The Lenape Talking Dictionary, an online resource developed in collaboration with linguists, preserves pronunciations and definitions. Nora Thompson Dean, who shared the word Lenapehoking with the wider world in 1970, was a fluent speaker and elder of the Delaware Tribe -- one of the last people to grow up speaking Lenape as a first language.

The term Lenapehoking has gained widespread use in recent literature on the Lenape and in land acknowledgments at New York cultural institutions. It appears in museum exhibits, university statements, and public ceremonies -- a word that was nearly lost now spoken in the buildings that stand on the land it describes. Whether land acknowledgments amount to meaningful recognition or comfortable symbolism is a question the Lenape themselves continue to raise. But the word endures. Beneath the concrete and asphalt of the world's most famous skyline, beneath the subway tunnels and fiber-optic cables, the geography is still Lenapehoking. Pearl Street in lower Manhattan was named for the Lenape shell middens that once lined the shore. The island of many hills remains, even if the hills have been leveled and the people who named them were forced to leave.