Munsee Names Project
Melissa Moreton, Caitlin Rizzo, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari describe the Munsee Names Project as “an Indigenous-led effort to support rediscovery and reclamation of the names of historical Munsee peoples - names and histories that have largely been lost, erased, or presented through the perspective of non-Indigenous peoples across the historical record.” The project began in November 2021 under Mark Peters (historian, knowledge keeper, and member of the Munsee Delaware Nation in Ontario), in collaboration with scholars and archivists at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The Ontario communities of the Thames River (today the Munsee-Delaware Nation centered in Muncey, and Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit in Moraviantown, Ontario) are part of the larger diasporic community of Lunaape peoples. The aim of the Munsee Names Project is to build a dataset of names of Munsee-Delaware community members from key historical documents, for use by present-day Munsee peoples, beginning with an 1829 Census made by colonial settlers documenting the names of “Munsee Indians” living in two villages (a small “Upper Village” and a larger “Lower Village”) located “on the flats of the River Thames in the Township of Carradoc” in present-day Ontario. The project builds on this foundational document, working to recover names from the earlier, pre-1829 period, and forward (drawing on Greg Curnoe’s massive archival compendium DEEDS/ NATIONS which includes hundreds of 19th-century names and biographical references).
The goals of the project are multifaceted, drawing on the past and looking to the future. They are to:
- transcribe the names of early community members as a way to begin to reclaim the earliest recorded histories of the community
- create a foundational dataset of names to use in future research into historical documents and narratives
- recover the names of historical Munsee peoples for use by name-givers in the present-day community
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