Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [18]
Lenape bands prepared and maintained their woodland planting fields by the slash-and-burn method, clearing out all but the largest trees and bushes, then burning off the rubbish and undergrowth every spring. This brought fallow land into cultivation quickly and returned essential nutrients to the soil, extending its productive life well beyond the two or three years possible with the European system of crop rotation. Sowing a variety of crops together in the same field—maize, sunflowers, beans, squash, melons, cucumbers, and tobacco—maintained high concentrations of nitrogen; it also required less work, because cornstalks, for example, could support the beans as well as man-made poles. What was more, the simple stone and wood implements of the Lenapes turned the soil easily without the damage caused by European plows and draft animals.
No less than the colonists who came after them, in other words, the Lenapes had “settled” the land by manipulating it to their purposes. Consciously or not, they used it in ways that extended the diversity of plant and animal life on which their survival depended. The heavy use of firewood around their principal habitation sites, combined with the annual spring burnoff of active planting fields, left vast, open, parklike forests where deer, rabbit, birds, and other game flourished. Their abandoned planting fields became the meadows and prairies that were home to a tangle of flowers and edible berries. And because Lenape spiritual beliefs emphasized the interdependence of all life, hunting was an enterprise loaded with such supernatural significance that excessive killing was avoided. The abundance that so amazed early European visitors was thus no mere accident of nature, for “nature” was an artifact of culture as well as geology.
LAZY AND BARBAROUS PEOPLE
Nothing made it harder for Europeans to see the link between the Lenapes and their environment than the fact that kinship—not class—was the basis of their society. Private ownership of land and the hierarchical relations of domination and exploitation familiar in Europe were unknown in Lenapehoking. By custom and negotiation with its neighbors, each Lenape band had a “right” to hunt, fish, and plant within certain territorial limits. It might, in exchange for gifts, allow other groups or individuals to share these territories, but this did not imply the “sale” or permanent alienation known to European law. In the absence of states, moreover, warfare among the Lenapes was much less systematic and brutal than among Europeans. As Daniel Denton said disdainfully: “It is a great fight where seven or eight is slain.”
More perplexing still, kinship in Lenape society was traced matrilineally. Families at each location were grouped into clans that traced their descent from a single female ancestor; phratries, or combinations of two or more clans, were identified by animal signs, usually “wolf,” “turtle,” and “turkey.” Children belonged by definition to their mother’s phratry: if she was a turtle, they were turtles. Land was assigned to clans, and the family units that comprised them, for their use only: they did not “own” it as Europeans understood the word and had no authority to dispose of it by sale, gift, or bequest. If the land “belonged” to anyone, it belonged to the inhabitants collectively.
On one point European and Lenape societies seemed similar: the division of labor by gender. Lenape women, along with cooking and childrearing, did the bulk of agricultural work—planting, weeding, harvesting, drying, packing, sorting—which made them responsible for as much as 90 percent of the food supply. During seasonal changes