ANNIE BLIMMEL
Contributing Reporter
When Principal Chief Dennis Coker of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware (LITD) reclaimed the first half-acre of land taken from his ancestors, he was hoping for the property to hold promises of a fresh start. Instead, it held echoes of the past, evident in the 200 car tires littering the property, among other contamination.
Just off of Fork Branch Road in the town of Cheswold, Delaware, sits this half-acre of property, donated to Coker and his Tribe in the 1990s. Once home to a Lenape schoolhouse and church, the site was used as an industrial dump for 30 to 40 years under state ownership. Over this time, the land accumulated high concentrations of heavy metals, invasive species such as “Ailanthus altissima,” truck beds and 200 car tires.
The land was returned to Coker and the Tribe once property flippers saw its degraded state. But what the rest of the world saw as undesirable, Coker saw as a sliver of hope.
“I viewed it as an opportunity, number one, to heal the land,” Coker said. “And our goal when we started looking and hoping for the Land Back movement to be a benefit to us was to really demonstrate that we could be good stewards of the land.”
And good stewards they were – in just a few years with the help of some volunteers, Coker and his Tribe rehabilitated the property into what is now an edible forest garden of native species. The garden features plants that nourish and sustain humans and animals alike.
“The goal was to design and create an edible forest garden,” Coker said. “When we say edible, it’s edible for all our relations. The four-legged, the two-legged, the winged.”
In just a few years, the LITD brought back the native environment and the indigenous histories that have been intertwined for centuries.
The story does not end here, however. Over two decades after the reclamation of the Fork Branch property, Coker was approached by a representative of the Conservation Fund, a nonprofit responsible for land acquisitions in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The fund helped the Tribe purchase five acres of freshwater wetland and five-and-a-half acres of forested upland, adjacent to the land they already owned. However, this land was contaminated as well.
The soil was deemed so toxic that restrictions on development were put into place, including the prohibition of drilling a well for groundwater access. With limited options for land use, Coker and the Tribe decided to begin a forest restoration project on the property, removing industrial debris and ailanthus plants.
At the time of publication, restoration is still ongoing, as decades of pollution cannot be undone overnight. Yet, what seems like an impossible task to others is a welcome challenge to Coker.
“If we were to expect to get land returned to us, we needed to show that we could be good stewards of that land,” Coker said. “People aren’t just going to give you property to have you disrespect it.”
Prior to European colonization and settlement, the Lenape, meaning “the people,” were the first stewards of their ancestral homeland, Lenapehoking. Once home to over 4,000 Lenape people in the 17th century, Lenapehoking spans what is now known as the Delaware River Basin, including the states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
A few hundred years later, the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware only makes up less than 0.5% of Delaware’s population, according to Coker.
“As long as we disavowed our culture, and started saying Christian prayers, then we were
no longer considered to be a threat to the colonizing population,” Coker said.
Within a hundred years, the Lenape experienced a population decline of 90%, which Coker explained was largely due to the environmental destruction taking place by settler colonialism.
“Many of those that left early left for that reason,” Coker said. “They couldn’t stomach the idea of their stewardship of their land being desecrated.”
According to Nathan Jessee, a professor of coastal environmental justice at the university, the perpetuation of such ecological degradation points to deeper narratives of environmental injustices faced by the Lenape and hundreds of other Indigenous communities across the country.
“The history of this country and Indigenous peoples that lived on this land before matter when you think about the creation of environmental injustice,” Jessee said. “You can’t really think about environmental justice until you really reckon with, ‘What are the kinds of violence and inequities and indignities that have been imposed upon communities of color and Indigenous peoples throughout this land?’”
Centuries worth of land grabs and the denial of their culture all serve as cumulative impacts of environmental injustices faced by the LITD. These impacts continue to compound on the Tribe, as they are unable to build a Lenape cultural center that has been in the works since 2021. Working to support a zero-carbon initiative while also reflecting Lenape cultural values towards the environment, the center would boast a living roof, geothermal HVAC, rain gardens for stormwater management and solar panels.
“It was really important to us for this to be a carbon neutral development with the idea that we were going to demonstrate to the non-Native population where we need to go with our thinking about this carbon society that we have,” Coker said. “We wanted to, again, set a good example.”
Their project, a 13-acre site with water exposure, has been stalled in the planning phase for nearly four years now as the Tribe has been unable to attain a suitable property. Even if their currently owned 12 acres of property was large enough, the land itself is too contaminated for development.
“At one point in time we had unfettered access to this whole region,” Coker said. “There were no property lines, there were no counties, we came and went as we pleased. It’s just sad that in the year 2025, we cannot find a 13-acre piece of property to build a community center on that doesn’t have to be on a brownfield site.”
In 2023, the Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN) offered the Tribe a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to fund the development of a cultural center. However, when pursuing options for a potential construction site, Coker was told by the state of Delaware, “We can’t help you,” and the Tribe had no choice but to deny the grant since they had no suitable land to build on.
Even if the Tribe was to find uncontaminated land to build a cultural center on, given the current actions of the Trump administration to block environmental projects, the grant is not likely to come around again any time soon.
For Coker and the Tribe, the cultural center would have been a physical manifestation of their sovereignty, a demonstration of their culture and their existence as a nation. But without the land to make all of this happen, the Lenape remains at a standstill.
According to Coker, there is a Native legend that goes as follows: Those who left their ancestral homeland in order to remove their traditions from the influences of colonization are known as keepers of the culture. Those who stayed behind to keep the connection with their environment are known as the keepers of the land.
As the legend foretells, one day, the keepers of the culture and the keepers of the land will reunite. As keepers of the land, it is the hope of the LITD to fulfill this legend and rekindle their culture, but this will require the reclamation of much more than 12 acres of property to their name and recognition by the non-Native population.
“My role is pretty much an educator to a great extent, just informing people that we are still here,” Coker said. “We’re a viable, thriving community of Native people. We are Lenape and we are rekindling the spirit of our culture through getting reacquainted with the natural world.”