the delaware nativist revival of the mid eighteenth century

The effects of the European conquest of America began to make themselves felt on the Delaware Indians in the early 17th century. By the mid-18th century, they had been uprooted from their homelands and their numbers had been decimated through the effects of war, disease and rum. One result was a nativist religious revival which developed two branches, both of which combined elements of native and non-native culture. The revival collapsed in the wake of the defeat of Pontiac in the 1760's. The history of all these events is considered in detail. The Indians of eastern North America reacted to the initial advance of European culture in several ways: some nations simply moved west, away from the white men; others battled to preserve their homelands; still others gave rise to secret societies, formed to drive out the whites. Among the Delawares, originally of eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and southeastern New York, the reaction to the European and his ways led, in time, to an attempt to restore the nativist traditions, as expressed in the rise of a religious revival in the 1750's and 1760's. That this nativist revival was not successful is not surprising. By the mid-eighteenth century the European's advanced technology, as well as his force of numbers, had irrevocably altered the Delawares' material culture; moreover, nearly a century-and-a-half of white contact had substantially altered the Indians' social structure and system of values as well. The Delawares first came in contact with white men in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, having their first dealings with the Swedish and Dutch fur traders along the Hudson River and Delaware Bay. The Indians exchanged their furs for kettles, clothing, firearms, and other elements of white material culture, gradually becoming more and more dependent on European goods, while simultaneously losing many native arts of subsistence. Later, in the 1670's and 1680's, and especially with the establishment of William Penn's colony in 1681,