Disambiguation of Lenape/Delaware/Mahican/River Indians

On page twelve of The Munsee Indians, A History, Robert Grumet states

The idea that cultures are...organizations of [internal] diversity is important... People identified as Munsees in one context and Mahicans [his spelling] in another did not suddenly become members of different cultures. Neither did references to people by different names necessarily suggest confusion or disorganization. Names used like this can reflect what may be called situational identity. Different names identifying the same people in different situations serve as markers of social flexibility that can allow a person to function as a Munsee in one context and a Mahican in another.

There was always cultural change, but that change accelerated after white contact. Grumet says that the fact that the Munsees were "enduring people" means that all the specifics of their lives changed. And with that change, it sometimes becomes harder to keep track of who is who. While Gromet says all the different names doesn't necessarily suggest confusion, I think that there is a lot of confusion about different names - I know for a fact that they aren't used with consistency.

The Arvid E. Miller Museum had a sign (maybe they still do) that listed many names and claimed they were all different names for the same tribe. I'd qualify that by saying that they were all legitimate names for the people now known - according to their most recent constitution - as "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community." That is not quite the same as saying all the names on the sign referred to exactly the same people in exactly the same context.

One of the names on the sign was "River Indians." According to Patrick Frazier, the River Indians included "the Mohicans and the Indians at Schaghticoke"(see page 6 of The Mohicans of Stockbridge).

Let's try another one. This is according to Grumet: "Today, many writers regard Lenape as the most appropriate term to use when talking about Delaware-speaking people." But he adds that "Lenape" is too broad of a term to be used in everyday language by the people themselves.

Wikipedia has pages where they "disambiguate" names that refer to more than one thing. Although I've made some attempt to disambugate the eastern Algonquian Indians here in this post, at some point, this disambugation becomes a fool's errand. We have to accept that the rapid change over the first 100 or 200 years of white contact resulted in complexity which, in turn, resulted in some confusion over names.

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