The Lenape peoples’ spiritual relationship with their environment is, I believe, rooted in their physical closeness and dependence on natural resources. Spiritual and religious beliefs arise out of a yearning towards a higher power as a driving force behind the universe. The Lenape, in their utterly nature-dependent lives, had no choice but to trust in nature as the ultimate source of power. Yet they were the ones who managed nature and learned to adapt and control it, and therefore they themselves became a part of the process.

Therefore, the idea of a total interlinking between man, animals, plants, and all other naturally existing elements, formed. Such spiritual beliefs would later be adopted by the American Transcendentalist poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost, but they originated in Native American tribes and in this case, the Lenape. The idea of maneto, the “spiritual indwelling of all things” ties the people together with the land and the animals. Humans are no more powerful than a rock. Rather, the maneto does not favor one entity over another. By linking themselves spiritually with nature, the Lenape acknowledge their subservience and solidarity with nature despite their ability to cultivate and manipulate resources.

The spirituality of the Lenape sharply contrasts what New York and modern America would become. In most modern societies, nature exists entirely apart from daily life. People live in the age of concrete and technology, and nature becomes “an escape”. Resources are cultivated and processed by specialists for broader society to enjoy. We do not live in constant contact with naturally existing resources, and therefore there is no spiritual connection to the land. In a weird way, we develop religious tendencies towards the entities that are most poignant in our lives. The current generation has an attachment to technology that uncannily reflects the Lenape attitude towards nature. The Lenape had a need to be constantly favoring the spirits that surrounded them in all natural things. They brought sacrifices and attributed and fixed all problems likewise. The current generation does not entrust its well-being in crops, but in phones and and other gadgets. While we may think that the Lenape relationship to the cosmos is a foreign concept in modern, intellectually leaning (and atheism prone) society, this sort of total subservience still exists, it is just manifested differently

This isn’t to say that I think that the Lenape’s focus on spirituality with regard to nature is necessarily superior and our generation is lost and such and such. They held “fluid boundaries” with their natural surroundings, and our smartphones are pretty much limbs at this point. Does that make us any worse off? Unclear, I think. But at the very least we have a basis of comparison that we can relate to so that we can better understand the Lenape’s spiritual connection to the cosmos.