Description
Hackensack was the exonym given by the Dutch colonists to a band of the Lenape, or Lenni-Lenape ("original men"), a Native American tribe. The name is a Dutch derivation of the Lenape word for what is now the region of northeastern New Jersey along the Hudson and Hackensack rivers. While the Lenape people occupied much of the mid-Atlantic area, Europeans referred to small groups of native people by the names associated with the places where they lived. The territory of the Hackensack was variously called Ack-kinkas-hacky, Achkinhenhcky, Achinigeu-hach, Ackingsah-sack, among other spellings (translated as "place of stony ground" or "mouth of a river") and included the areas around the Upper New York Bay, Newark Bay, Bergen Neck, the Meadowlands, and the Palisades.
Language
Munsee (also known as Munsee Delaware, Delaware, Ontario Delaware, Delaware) is an endangered language of the Eastern Algonquian subgroup of the Algonquian language family, itself a branch of the Algic language family.
Culture
The Lenape engaged in agriculture and seasonally migrated, cultivating companion planting at their campsites to supplement foraging, hunting, fishing, trapping, and shellfishing. The terrain they inhabited was diverse: wide tidal flats and oyster beds, forested mountains, and level land that could be cultivated. The Hackensack would relocate their semi-permanent village every several years to allow the land to renew itself. It was usually sited between Tantaqua and the middle reaches of the Hackensack River. Their summer encampment and council fire was located at Gamoenpa, (the "big landing-place from the other side of the river"). At Hopoghan Hackingh (meaning "land of the tobacco pipe"), they collected soapstone from which to carve tobacco pipes. The Hackensack identified themselves with the totem of the turtle ("Turtle Clan").