Page 336 - Hunter - The Vigil
P. 336

O
                                                                                                              R
                                                                                                                Y
                                                                                                T
                                                                                A AN OCCULT HISTORY
                                                                                  N
                                                                                          C
                                                                                                                Y
                                                                                                                Y
                             “Philadelphia isn’t as bad as
                                Philadelphians say it is.”
                               — 1970s-era billboard aimed

                                  at boosting civic pride.






            attitude makes it hard for one hunter group to convince  hunting and gathering. Contact between European explorers
            another to care about a threat that doesn’t have an impact  and settlers and the Delaware Indians, as the invaders called
            on its domains. What’s worse, hunter groups themselves have  them, eventually resulted in disease and decline for the
            been known to come to blows over turf issues, distracting  Lenape. Despite shrewdly balancing their alliances with
            them from the Vigil and leaving innocents undefended.   different European nationalities and later providing troops to
                                                              the rebel colonies’ Continental Army, over time the Lenape
                           An Occult History                  people would be crowded westward as the newcomers made
                                                              the continent their own.

               The Delaware River Valley was first visited in the early
                                                                  Philadelphia received its charter as capital of the colony
            1600s by Europeans who found the area hosted bands of
                                                              of Pennsylvania in 1682. A proprietary colony, Pennsylvania
            Native Americans known as the Lenape, or Leni-Lenape.
                                                              was owned and governed by British admiral William Penn,
            The natives’ matrilineal clans ranged throughout modern-
                                                              rather than controlled directly by the British crown. Penn, a
            day New Jersey, north to the New York harbor area, east into
                                                              Quaker who’d experienced religious persecution, envisioned
            Pennsylvania and south to northern Delaware. The lifestyle
                                                              a city in which residents of different faiths could live together
            of the Lenape included small-scale agriculture and mobile








































                                                                                                              335
                                                                                                              335
   331   332   333   334   335   336   337   338   339   340   341