Charles Elkhair

Charles Elkhair (1848–1935), known in Lenape as Kòkwëlëpuxwe, “One Who Walks Backward,” was one of the most important Lenape storytellers and traditionalists recorded in the early twentieth century. His father, Mo-se-ha-kund, “Hair of an Elk,” was a young boy when more than 1,300 Lenape left Indiana in 1820 and crossed the Mississippi during their forced westward migration. Years later, he passed to Charles the stories he had grown up hearing, creating a remarkable link between generations of Lenape memory.

Working with anthropologist M. R. Harrington, Charles and his wife Susan helped preserve Lenape stories that, more than a century later, were published in On the Turtle’s Back: Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren. Elkhair’s accounts include the disappearance of corn, the Misingwe, the Big House Ceremony, and stories of culture heroes such as the Strong Man and the Big Fish. He also contributed a short version of the creation tradition in which animals dove beneath a world covered by water seeking earth. Muskrat finally returned dead, but with soil clutched in his paws; the earth was placed upon Turtle’s back and grew into the land on which people live.

Through Charles Elkhair, we can hear stories carried across generations of Lenape history. He was not simply a storyteller, but a knowledgeable traditionalist and singer in the Big House, preserving beliefs and traditions as well as stories. What his father had heard as a child was passed to Charles, and what Charles remembered was ultimately committed to paper, preserving a remarkable chain of Lenape memory that can still be read today.