Neolin (the Delaware Prophet) was a prophet of the Lenni Lenape, who was derided by the British as "The Imposter". Beginning in 1762, Neolin believed that Native American's should reject European goods abandon dependancy on foreign settlers in order to return to a more traditional aboriginal lifestyle. He made arguments against alcohol, materialism, and polygamy. Neolin's most famous follower was Pontiac. A prophet is a person who is believed to speak through divine inspiration. ... The Lenape or Lenni-Lenape (later named Delaware Indians by Europeans) were, in the 1600s, loosely organized bands of Native American people practicing small-scale agriculture to augment a largely mobile hunter-gatherer society in the region around the Delaware River, the lower Hudson River, and western Long Island Sound. ... 1762 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... In chemistry, an alcohol is any organic compound in which a hydroxyl group (-OH) is bound to a carbon atom, which in turn is bound to other hydrogen and/or carbon atoms. ... In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. ... The term polygamy (literally many marriages in late Greek) is used in related ways in social anthropology and sociobiology. ... No authentic images of Pontiac are known to exist. ...
Neolin (whose name means "the enlightened") was one of several Delaware prophets who arose in the latter part of the eighteenth century along the Susquehanna and Allegheny rivers in Pennsylvania and the Cuyahoga and Muskingum rivers in Ohio.
A further dimension of Neolin's message was not always grasped by Pontiac, that is, that the Great Spirit had allowed the whites to control the land and had taken away game animals as a punishment for the immorality of the Indians.
Neolin (the Delaware Prophet) was a prophet of the Lenni Lenape, who was derided by the British as "The Imposter".