Lenape Indian Life

Now to catch these fish, of course, like today they could use fish hooks. They made him out of bone out of shell, but to catch a lot more fish, you might want to make yourself a spear, something like this one here. It has a way of catching fish three different ways. It was very long, so it was easy to actually locate the fish in the water and you could spear them. And that way they wouldn't wiggle off. To catch larger fish, harpoons. You would have a harpoon like this with connected to a rope, and there were some pretty large fish. We have sturgeon, even in the Hudson and the Delaware river today. And back when the lenape were here, there was some sturgeon where there were bigger than 15 feet long, and so you might want to need something like this to catch a fish. At night, oftentimes they would go hunting, or fishing I should say, and you might want to take a torch. This is birch bark, and you can light it on fire, and this would attract the fish right to your canoe. So even during the night you can go fishing. Now, to catch a lot of fish, there was an easier way. You might be able to use fish weirs and fish nets. Let's take a look. Now an easier way to catch fish, of course, is you can always build yourself a fish weir. As you can see out there, it's a fence like structure. They would actually build out across the stream or out in the Lake. And they would actually funnel the fish. You might take nets and push their scare the fish into that. There's an opening and into a basket that they have waiting there. And catch a lot of fish that way. Sometimes the whole village might have never helped out in that sense. But that was a way for getting a lot of fish at one time. And once you got though, that large number of fish later on, you can see how they actually cut them apart and hung them on racks to dry. But those are called fish weirs. And out there, he's still fishing, he's using a harpoon. Out in the canoe. But very patient, but they were very, very good fishermen. Now another way of catching fish, of course, was using fish nets. That's what we have over here. Fishnets, we used to catch fish, just like today. Back then, they, of course, they would use very kinds of plant fibers that they would twist together to make string. And create these nets. Some of them, hundreds of feet long, and to float in that on top, you might actually put gourds or wooden floats, and to make the bottom of the net sink down, you had what they call net sinkers. Simple rocks with two little notches that they would tie in helps to weight the neck down. And these they could take out and stretch across a Lake or a river and a circle large numbers of fish too. So they were very important to the Lenape as well.