Page 336 - Hunter - The Vigil
P. 336
O
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A AN OCCULT HISTORY
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“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
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