Raritan was the name given by Europeans in the seventeenth century who colonized the region around what is now called the Raritan River and its bay, to the Native American bands of Lenape people then living in what is now northeastern New Jersey and Staten Island, New York.
It is generally believed that the name comes from one of the Lenape languages (among the languages in the Algonquian language group), though there are a variety of interpretations as to its meaning. It may be a derivation of Naraticong meaning "river beyond the island", or Roaton or Raritanghe, names of a group which had come from across the Hudson and displaced the previous population known as Sanhican. (who moved to farther into the interior). Alternatively, Raritan is a Dutch pronunciation of wawitan or rarachons, meaning "forked river" or "stream overflows".
The Raritan had early contact with settlers in the colony of New Netherland. William Kieft, governor of New Netherland, planned an extermination campaign against them, on the pretext of pigs being stolen from a farm on present-day Staten Island. The attack against the American Indians, while not causing much damage, was a contributing event to the bands' allying in Kieft's War against the settlements of New Netherland.
Famous quotes containing the word tribe:
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)