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The intensity of contact with European settlers resulted in the gradual displacement of some of the Lenape people from their aboriginal homeland, in a series of population movements of genocidal intent involving forced relocation and consolidation of small local groups, extending over a period of more than two hundred years. At the first contact of Europeans colonizers in the seventeenth century, the Lenape resided in relatively small communities consisting of a few hundred people .This is also referred to as The Long Walk. It was due to the new United States breaking the first treaty it had ever signed. The currently used names were gradually applied to the larger groups resulting from the genocidal forced relocation policy of the United States. The ultimate result was the displacement of virtually all Lenape-speaking people from their homeland to Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin, upstate New York, and Canada.

Equally affected by consolidation and dispersal, Munsee groups moved to several locations in southern Ontario as early as the late eighteenth century, to Moraviantown, Munceytown, and Six Nations. Several different patterns of migration led to groups of Munsee speakers moving to Stockbridge, Wisconsin; Cattaraugus, New York; and Kansas. In 1892 the Munsee-Delaware and Moraviantown children were sent to Mount Elgin Residential School where only English language was permitted to be spoken. The Lenape language began it's disappearance along the Grand River in Six Nations and to rapidly vanish in Munsee-Delaware Nation. Only in Moraviantown the Lenape language was used on a daily basis from a majority of the nation and help on the preservation of the language. Today Munsee survives only at Moraviantown, where there are two fluent first language speakers aged 77 and 90 as of 2018. There are no fluent speakers left on Munsee-Delaware nation of the Lenape people living in Canada, however there are members that are working to revitalize the language within the community.