Tip: Search for both "Lenape" and "Delaware" as terms may be used inconsistently
Swarthmore College’s Land Acknowledgement Task Force was formed in Spring 2021 to write a statement “that recognizes and honors the history of the land on which the College sits and the Indigenous people who stewarded it throughout the generations.” The statement was completed in 2022 and affirmed by the Board of Managers in 2023. With the understanding that “a statement alone without substantive action behind it is insufficient,” the Task Force also created recommendations on how the College can continue to build relationships with Indigenous leaders, to which Valerie Smith committed in 2023. Swarthmore’s Land Acknowledgement comes after many other colleges and universities throughout Turtle Island developed different forms of land acknowledgement. As scholars Steward-Ambo and Yang write, land acknowledgements “should materialize responsibility to Indigenous people,” and settlers giving land acknowledgements in colleges and universities should “learn and embody Indigenous understandings of relationality.”
The Conservation and Stewardship Plan for the Crum Woods of Swarthmore College from 2003 is the beginning of a long-term plan to steward the 220 acres of the Crum Woods as a natural resource, develop ecosystem functionality and benefit the Swarthmore College and larger community. The 2003 report includes a section on land use history and human influences on the landscape which describes land use practices of the Lenape people, interaction with European settlers and Lenape displacement.
In May 2023, President Valerie Smith released a letter to Swarthmore community members acknowledging a “disturbing chapter” of Swarthmore history. Smith acknowledged that in the late nineteenth-century, Swarthmore professor Spencer Trotter and his student assistant Bird T. Baldwin excavated a Lenape burial ground in Chester County and brought Lenape human remains to campus. Swarthmore professor Spencer Trotter, who worked at Swarthmore from 1888-1926, was the Head of the Biology department, a Professor of natural history and anthropology, and the namesake of the social sciences building Trotter Hall. Because of Trotter’s role disrupting indigenous gravesites and his “writings focused on racial hierarchy,” Smith promised to consider renaming Trotter Hall. She also stated that the College had “decommissioned all human specimens in the Biology Department’s osteology collection,” and announced the creation of a collegewide audit committee to investigate Swarthmore’s holdings.
These resources, written by non-indigenous researchers and members of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania*, focus on the Unami Lenape language classes which Shelley DePaul, an educator and language specialist who is a member of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania*, taught at Swarthmore College between 2009-2022. The classes were intended to preserve the “endangered” language of Unami Lenape and were taught to majority settler students. The resources below analyze these classes and touch on debates over how authenticity and identity shape the processes of language revitalization and learning.
*Note: The Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania is neither federally or state recognized, making their relationship with Swarthmore College a source of some controversy. Please see the home page of this guide, under "Delaware/Lenape Communities Today," for more context on this issue.
Swarthmore student activists on campus have long recognized Lenape sovereignty over the land, and drawn connections between Lenape displacement and resistance and contemporary struggles for justice. Below are just two examples.
