I used modern highways to follow an ancient trail my ancestors followed called the Minsi Path to the mouth of the Delaware River, and from there down to Assateague national seashore. It’s the only undeveloped coastline left in Lenapehoking, and you can backpack and camp there.
Driving through Lenapehoking seeing signs with misappropriated Lenape names like “Conshohocken” on them was surreal. I recalled a recent trip to Ireland with my mother to celebrate her 80th birthday, and how impressed I was that the signs were also in Irish, not just English. Seeing bastardized Lenape language used in Lenapehoking is the opposite of that. It would be like seeing those signs in Ireland, without any Irish people living there. It’s a homage to ethnic cleansing, not to us.
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Lenapehoking is now home to hundreds of Superfund sites and some of the worst pollution on the continent, and the Delaware River contributes more plastic to the Atlantic Ocean than any other waterway in North America.
I often think about how that wouldn’t be the case if we were still caretaking Lenapehoking, because we would never devise an economic system that requires us to commit genocide against our own ecological family.