Lenape time of sustained European contact in the 1600s and 1700s the Lenape were a powerful Native American nation who inhabited a region on the mid-Atlantic coast spanning the latitudes of southern Massachusetts to the southern extent of Delaware in what anthropologists call the Northeastern Woodlands. Although never politically unified, the confederation of the Delaware roughly encompassed the area around and between the Delaware and lower Hudson rivers, and included the western part of Long Island in present-day New York. Some of their place names, such as Manhattan ("the island of many hills"), Raritan, and Tappan were adopted by Dutch and
Lenape Ontario. The name Lenni Lenape, also Leni Lenape and Lenni Lenapi, comes from their autonym, ', which may mean "genuine, pure, real, original," and ', meaning "Indian" or "man" (cf. Anishinaabe, in which ', cognate with ', means "man" or "male"). Alternately, "" may be translated as "man." The Lenape, when first encountered by Europeans, were a loose association of related peoples who spoke similar languages and shared familial bonds in an area known as Lenapehoking, the Lenape traditional territory, which spanned what is now eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, southern New York, and eastern Delaware. The tribe's common name "Delaware"