For more than 12,000 years before the first Europeans arrived, the Lenape people and their predecessors lived in the Cheswold area, fishing, hunting deer and other animals, and gathering nuts, seeds, and other plant products for food, medicines, and raw materials while moving seasonally to places where resources were most abundant. When European settlers arrived in the early 1600s, this traditional way of life changed dramatically, and over the next century thousands of Lenape people across their homeland died from smallpox and other European diseases. As Europeans, who depended on cultivated crops and domesticated animals, regarded much of Lenape territory as unused, English settlers flooded into the area by the 1660s, divided up the land, cleared the forests, and left little room for the people who had lived there for millennia. Many Lenape families left Delaware and other parts of their homeland and eventually settled in Oklahoma and western Ontario, Canada, while some families descended from the Sicconese people remained in their ancestral lands and gathered in north central Kent County, where they formed a tribal community that has survived as a distinct people for the last 300 years. Known today as the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, the Lenape people of Kent County maintained an identity separate from their Euro-American and African-American neighbors by hiding in plain sight through European clothing, European-style houses, Christianity, and other European cultural practices, while using family, church, and schools to regulate their community outside the wider society’s governing structures. The Cheswold Lenape community, once known as Moors, has been acknowledged by the state of Delaware for more than 130 years, and today it is represented by a constitutional government that seeks to protect Lenape cultural identity in Delaware, promote the physical and economic health of its citizens, and advocate for the civil and human rights of the community.