News Item

The Delaware Tribe of Indians Housing Committee continues to hold Open Meetings on the 3rd Thursday of each month at 6:00 P.M. The July, September, and November meetings are to be held at the Chelsea Boys & Girls Club in Chelsea, OK, and the June, August, and October meetings are to be held at the main tribal campus in Bartlesville, OK. Please note: The Housing Committee has changed their meeting date from June 20 to June 27 at 6:00 P.M. This meeting will be held at Bartlesville Tribal Headquarters in the Tribal Council Chambers. Please see the flyer below for further details.

The Tribe on March 27 recognized the first recipients of the Warrior Medal of Freedom, the Tribe’s highest honor. The honor was presented to those who served in the military for their taking the oath to protect our Tribe and Nation against all enemies, and the civilian award is for the Warrior who fought to keep our sovereignty and culture alive and continues to fight for our rights. Below, Elder & Navy Veteran Steven Donnell presents the award to Chief Brad KillsCrow (US Navy), Sarah Boyd (US Army Combat Veteran-Iraq), and Annette Ketchum for her lifetime work keeping tribal sovereignty and cultural preservation alive. Other Awardees not photographed were Jim Baker (US Army) and Marcus Falleaf (US Marine Corps).

Notice: The Delaware Indian calendar for 2024 is now available on the tribal website https://delawaretribe.org/ or at this address:
https://delawaretribe.org/blog/2023/12/01/download-a-2024-lenape-calendar/
You can download your copy and print all the pages at once or print one month at a time as needed. For a wall calendar we suggest using 8.5 x 14 inch (legal size) paper.

Revived: The Lenape Word-a-Day calendar is a monthly calendar of Lenape names for different things. The downloadable calendar is also posted on the Tribal website https://delawaretribe.org/ and it will continue to be posted at the beginning of each month. There are sound files for each of these words which are in the Lenape Talking Dictionary: https://www.talk-lenape.org/.

What’s New – Going to the Moon

In the TV news recently they said that in the year 2024 America will once again send people to or around the moon. It might be of interest to readers of the Delaware Indian News to know that according to tribal legend there were two Lenape men who went to the moon many centuries ago. In the Lenape language the Sun and Moon have the same name, Kishux, and they are considered as Elder Brothers. There are also some special names for the Moon if you need to let people know you are talking about him exclusively. The two men had a purpose for going there and what follows is the basic story telling the reason. There are several variants of this story that had them going to the sun, or first to the sun who sent them to the moon. 

Tùkwsi Kishux òk Kitahikàn

Full Moon and Ocean

Here is a brief version of the story:

There was a monster that lived in a lake and he was killing Lenape children. Two young men said that they knew a way to kill the monster and they would have to go to the sun to get some of his ashes to put in the lake. (A version of this story can be heard in the Lenape Taking Dictionary at this address: https://www.talk-lenape.org/stories?id=41.

The two men found some sunbeams and they climbed on them to get to the sun. In one version of the story they got ashes from him and in another version the sun told them to go to the moon because his ashes would cause the Earth to burn up.

So they went to the moon and got some ashes and returned to Earth and threw them in the Lake and the water began to boil and the monster was killed. But before he died he told them, “You have killed me for nothing because there are many of my children in other large bodies of water.”

(In the tale told by Willie Longbone in 1939 a young woman gave birth to a male child that was half fish and she threw it into a lake. It grew large and began to kill children so two young men went to the sun for fire but the sun refused them saying the heat would burn the whole Earth. He told them to go to the ‘night sun’ (the moon) who gave them some ashes. They threw the ashes into the lake where the monster lived and the lake boiled and the monster was killed.)

Lenape names for the Sun and Moon and their phases:

The Sun

Kishux: Sun; Moon; Month
wipèkw / wipëko: Sunbeam / Sunbeams
Wsike: Sunset; The Sun is setting
Winkpèkw: The Sun is drawing water (What the sunbeams do)
Kwtai Kishux: Eclipse (Sun or Moon)

The Moon

Kishux: Sun; Moon; month
Piskewëni kishux: Moon
Nipahàm: Moon (an older word)
Nipaii kishux: Moon (an older word)
Mësëtchèsu kishux: Full Moon
Tùkwsi kishux: Full Moon
Wëski kishux: New Moon
Òxehëmu: Moonlight

Jacob Parks, Delaware Artist, about 1930

From the January 2024 issue of the Delaware Indian News. For more from this issue, as well as a full archive of past issues, click here.