Lenape (Delaware)

A people

Brandywine Falls dropping 60 feet over a sandstone ledge into the gorge at Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
Erik Drost, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0

Background

The Lenape were among the peoples who lived in the Cuyahoga valley in the 1600s and 1700s, where NPS counts them with the Oneida, the Ottawa and the Wyandot and calls them the Lenape known today as the Delaware. They are a living people and more than one government speaks for them. Many of their descendants live on two reservations in Oklahoma, at Anadarko and Bartlesville, and the federal government recognises the Lenape as having ties to Ohio. Delaware Nation, based at Anadarko, gives its own name as Lenape or Lenni-Lenape and the English name for its people as the Grandfathers, and records one treaty with the United States, made on September 17, 1778. NPS estimates that between a third and a half of the populations of the valley's tribes died of European disease, with the treaties that followed pushing them west.

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Parks on its homelands

Brandywine Falls dropping 60 feet over a sandstone ledge into the gorge at Cuyahoga Valley National Park.Cuyahoga Valley National Park

The Lenape have the most historic ties to the Cuyahoga Valley, and many of their descendants live on two reservations in Oklahoma, at Anadarko and Bartlesville. The park calls the Lenape the Delaware and says the federal government recognizes them as tied to Ohio. Source

Sources

Checked September 2026.

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