Unami

The Unami were the southern and largest of the three main divisions of the Lenape, or Delaware Indians, occupying the lower Delaware valley. Like all Lenape they were organized into matrilineal Wolf, Turtle and Turkey clans, grew maize, beans and squash and made wampum from coastal shells.

Dutch and Swedish traders reached them in the seventeenth century, and in 1682 William Penn made his treaty of friendship with the Lenape at Shackamaxon. The fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737 drove the river Lenape from their homeland, and the Treaty of Easton in 1758 pushed them west into the Ohio Country.

There they settled in Moravian mission towns such as Gnadenhutten, where Pennsylvania militia massacred nearly a hundred Christian Lenape in 1782. Subsequent treaties carried the Unami bands to Kansas and finally Oklahoma.