'Being' in Delaware Country: Authenticity and the Perception of Cultural Decline

This paper examines the question of ‘Being’ as it pertains to the cultural life of the Delaware Tribe of Indians. A cultural life that many in the tribe perceive to be at the precipice of dissolution as a unique, coherent entity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it seeks to understand the "authentic" and "inauthentic" responses to this existential situation and the manner in which Delaware people variously either express or perform their ontological make-up as something specifically Delaware and (attempt to) uphold attendant commitments or, conversely, are thought to be falling back upon and conforming to popular public settler-colonial representations of “being Indian” or subscribing to a homogenizing pan-Indianism.