Princeton University Library (PUL) patrons looking for materials on Lenape people have a new curated collection to browse at Firestone Library. Located on the first floor in the Discovery Hub, the Lenape Collection replaced the previous Indigenous Studies Collection.

“Gabriel Swift and I had in mind a way of taking the original, broadly organized collection, which was started in part as a response to the visiting Munsee Symposium, and making it a more focused entity for patrons and researchers,” said Steven Knowlton, Librarian for History and African American Studies. 

Curating this new collection meant pulling items that were housed in disparate areas throughout the Library and placing them in one location with a specific focus on the Lenape.

The Lenape were the people who inhabited New Jersey when Europeans first came to the area. Some Lenape still live in the Garden State, while the descendants of others who were forced out of New Jersey now live in Wisconsin, Ontario, and Oklahoma. 

“For people doing Lenape studies, this collection is advantageous because the books cover a variety of topics — history, anthropology, language, folklore, religion — and are now collocated in a single location.”

Currently there are 89 monographs in the collection, which Knowlton amassed by sifting through PUL’s catalog using search terms like “Lenape,” “Delaware Indian,” and “Munsee.” He also found items about groups that are culturally related to the Lenape, such as the Nanticoke tribe, as well as items about  the linguistics of the Algonquin language subfamily, to which the Lenape dialects Munsee and Unami belong. 

Like many of the Library’s collections, the Lenape Collection is not stagnant, and Knowlton is open to updating it based on user feedback. That said, Knowlton is confident in the existing collection. 

“Between the printed books in the Lenape collection and its extensive selections of digitized books from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, PUL has access to nearly every Lenape related item that’s listed in WorldCat,” said Knowlton. The only exceptions are a few language workbooks that are no longer available on the second-hand market. 

He added that some of the 19th century journals, like “Transactions of the American Philosophical Society” and “Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin” can provide additional information. Those issues, however are still housed with the rest of the journals in the Library, rather than in the Lenape Collection.

Knowlton said, “For those who are interested in the culture, history, and current conditions of the Lenape, this collection will bring together all that the Library has available.”

To provide suggestions for the collection, please reach out to Knowlton at [email protected].