Through years of collaboration with members of the Oklahoma Delaware community, the editors of this collection of Delaware oral histories have crafted an attractive, wonderfully illustrated and accessible book that will be a resource for those with an interest in the Delaware for years to come. The pages are of heavy, durable construction, and excellent color photographs of Delaware people and events can be found throughout the book. The images add life to the transcriptions in a way that words can never do and give the reader a visually rewarding experience of, and appreciation for, the vitality of the Delaware community today. As an employee of the Delaware Tribe as well as a once frequent participant in the Delaware community, I found myself drawn to the images, most of which were documenting events of which I was already familiar but was viewing again from a more nostalgic frame.
The goal driving this edited volume was neither ethnographic nor historical, as is most of the literature on the Delaware. The editors and their colleagues wanted to provide a compilation of Delaware life histories that would complement a larger documentary project designed to raise awareness about the lives of Delaware people in Oklahoma and connections with their former reservation land in Indiana. The interviews are thus intentionally presented as “stand-alone memoir … where the readers can be active participants, picking up points and making connections on their own” (xiii). The interviewees themselves speak about the continuity and change that they have witnessed in their own lives, so that third-person narrative about the Delaware experience is absent. To this end, the book is a success and is an important contribution to the literature on the Eastern Delaware.
The book is introduced with a chapter by James Rementer and Deborah Nichols-Ledermann that outlines Delaware history and removal. The volume is then divided into five parts, but it is best conceptualized as two separate collections and may have worked better as two separate books. In the first collection, which comprises about a quarter of the book, the editors have made available several previously unpublished interviews with Delaware people that were collected by different researchers under different auspices throughout the twentieth century. Such interviews begin with ten interviews from Indian Pioneer Papers that were collected during the Depression Era, followed by three interviews from the Doris Duke Collection collected in the late 1960s, and finally two interviews conducted by Kay Wood in the mid 1990s. In the second part are included multiple interviews conducted by the editors with Delaware people over the past decade. The contemporary interviews convey a range of life experiences. Some explain their long-time involvement in the Delaware community, while other voices reflect an individual’s recent homecoming and return to participation in the local Delaware events and socio-political life. As collaborator Deborah Nichols-Ledermann reflects, “The reader can expect to see a wide variety of experiences in being Lenape as we are not all cookie-cutter Indians” (103).
Echoing Nichols-Lederman, the editors have successfully conveyed this diversity, and the conclusion is easily drawn by the reader that the level of one’s participation is an important element for inclusion in the Delaware community. In focusing on the importance of stand-alone life experiences, however, the editors inadvertently mask other important elements from the reader. One striking oversight is that the contemporary interviews were mostly drawn from self-identified Bartlesville (and Dewey) Delawares. This identification as a Bartlesville Delaware means nothing to outsiders but is an important identity marker in modern Delaware society, in which political and social ties are often regionally based. Although a few interviews came from beyond the Bartlesville folks, the voices from the Copan, Nowata, and Chelsea Delawares are unfortunately muffled, although each comprises an important component of the past and present Delaware Tribe. The contemporary interviews that provide the bulk of the book do not represent well the entire Delaware community, and such focus is hinted at by the editors, who explain that the participants were selected in collaboration with the Chiefs of the Delaware Tribe at the time that the interviews were collected. Thus, while the voices in the book that are lost are obvious to anyone familiar with Delaware society, the interviews do accurately convey the diversity of experiences among a very active, responsible, and preservation-minded group within the Delaware community that has been working very hard to maintain and pass along an appreciation of the importance of Delaware traditionalism to subsequent generations as well as to the general public.
Anyone familiar with the Delaware also knows that a hallmark of the active Delaware community is frequent participation from non-Indian and non-Delaware friends, intermarried spouses, and adopted family members. As a reflection of such acceptance, there are several individuals (one of them is found in the Indian Pioneer Papers) whose interviews are included but who are not Delaware tribal members nor do they claim to be of Lenape descent. Including such voices does not detract from the Delaware experience but better reveals the very racial and ethnic diversity that is characteristic of the Delaware community. This fact is one of which I imagine the editors are well aware, but it is a reality that is misrepresented in one of the few places where the editors offer their own commentary and should have been better explained. As the editors state in the book’s preface, “The people whose oral histories appear in this book are descendants of the Lenape who traveled 1,500 miles across this continent over a period of some two hundred years. Each of the speakers has continued identity and enrollment as a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians” (xv). A more careful revision of the book’s preface would have certainly caught this error.
It should also be noted that the editors chose not to include all of the interviews from each historic collection selected, and editorial changes were made to each interview, some of which were extensively abridged. Some may find fault with this decision, but such editorial choices were made in order to follow the book’s life history format, and certainly the length and cost of the book were considerations as well. However, the addition of more historic collections, or more from each historic collection, may have better balanced the work and given an even more useful resource for the Delaware and scholars alike.
Long Journey Home is thus a work that cannot be missed by anyone with a serious interest in learning about the Delaware. It is a compilation of past and present Delaware experiences that will serve as a beautifully illustrated record of the Delaware community in the twenty-first century. Although some may see faults in specific areas, it is certain to be an addition to the vast literature that documents the persistence of the Delaware Tribe.
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[Review length: 1130 words • Review posted on June 5, 2008]