Wild Rice and Munsee Lenape Lifeways in the New Jersey Meadowlands
How did pèhpastèk historically contribute to Munsee Lenape lifeways in the Meadowlands? Pèhpastèk (wild rice) was an important staple crop within Munsee Lenape diets. Munsee Lenape place names for the marsh behind Snake Hill, in the Meadowlands, reflect the landscape’s important status as a place for growing and gathering the plant.
Munsee Lenape people harvested pèhpastèk in the marshy area behind the Meadowlands’ Snake Hill using canoes and wooden paddles. One person would paddle the canoe, while another would gently bend the stalks of the wild rice plant over the canoe and tap them with a paddle to release the plant’s ripe kernels. During harvest time, Lenape people purposefully allowed some of the rice kernels to fall into the water to ensure germination of the following year’s crop. Prior cultural landscape reports submitted to State of New Jersey authorities have suggested that the Meadowlands bears no trace of historic Lenape settlement. Yet Lenape place names, archived herbaria specimens, and Lenape traditions reveal a different story.
Explore the map to follow the currents of Lenape history that run through the Meadowlands’ marshes.To view the map in its full format, be sure to click on the “Full Screen” box at the top left. Then, allow the layers to load. Use the “Layer Opacity” sliders to compare different layers of historical information. Use the “Map Layers” control to add and remove layers.
Once you’ve opened the map in “Full Screen” Zoom out to examine the full set of wild rice herbaria specimens catalogued in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Note how many of the specimens cluster around the Meadowlands. Zoom in to examine the map annotations.What do you see? You might find, for example, that the 1666 Newark-Lenape Treaty line was drawn such that Hackensack Lenape people retained their access to Pèhpastèk. Turn on the layer “Historic Munsee Lenape Settlements in Northern NJ” to see how the Treaty Line extends from a Lenape settlement at Third River to Sëkëxkuk, “Place of the black snakes” (the marsh beneath Snake Hill, just below Hackensack Lenape people’s traditional wild rice harvesting grounds, and the town of Secaucus).
This map was constructed using the open-source mapping application LeafletJS by Charlotte Leib, a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Yale University, using sources from her dissertation research. It is the first component within a series of digital essays that Charlotte will author in the coming year, examining the stories of six plants that were historically important to Lenape/Lunaape lifeways in the present-day New Jersey Meadowlands.
Sources: Georeferenced map layers come from the “Indigenous Place Names” map published by Kevin Wright in 1994, maintained by the Bergen County Historical Society, and from a map of historic Lenape settlements assembled in the twentieth-century by Herbert Kraft for the Newark Museum (now the Newark Museum of Art). Digitized herbaria specimens are from the New York Botanic Garden C.V. Starr Digital Herbarium and Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Additional map layers come from MapTiler, Open Street Maps, the Library of Congress, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protectionand New Jersey Geographic Information Network Open Data Portal.
Support: The work for this map was supported by a Digital Humanities Fellowship at the American Philosophical Society Center for Digital Scholarship and an Early-Career Digital Publication Small Grant from the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library.
Thanks: Charlotte thanks Anita Bakshi for the invitation to contribute to Our Land, Our Stories website, and Michaeline Mann and members of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation for sharing the Munsee stories and knowledge that will continue to inform this series.