Penhawitz and Wampage and the Seventeenth-Century World They Dominated

Abstract

Archaeological finds made nearly a century ago in New York City provide a unique opportunity to reshape the traditional, self-congratulatory stories of settler colonial society. This essay focuses on the major roles two Native leaders, Penhawitz and Wampage, and their descendants played in the development of New Amsterdam and New Netherland. By including their forgotten stories and analyzing archaeological sites found in their territories, a more complex view of the crucial inter-cultural economic and political alliances that marked the Dutch colony emerges. Finally, the significance of Native human remains found on Ellis Island to this reshaping of New York’s history is discussed.

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At the time of the European incursions, what is now New York City was part of a larger Native territory that modern elders call Lenapehoking, land of the people.¹ Its seventeenth-century residents, members of a larger Algonquian group, the Lenape or Delaware, spoke a dialect called Munsee and had social and economic ties with similar-speaking peoples in villages across a territory that stretched from the lower Hudson Valley and western Long Island across northern New Jersey. Although these local peoples, the stewards of the land, are known as Munsee, after their dialect, there was no single Munsee political unit at that time, no tribe, just a number of small independent, loosely organized groups, commonly named after a particular place or a leader of proven ability. Their leaders or sachems led by persuasion and individuals moved freely from one group to another as their circumstances warranted (Cantwell and Wall 2001; Goddard 1978). In the seventeenth century, they were the Americans.²

The stories of these Americans are often ignored today, buried in what is seen by some as the grand story of European colonization or the equally grand one of the rise of New York City as a major world capital. But when the Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century, New York had been Indian country for at least 13,000 years (Cantwell and Wall 2001, 2010). And, during that tumultuous seventeenth century, the Munsee³ were in no way marginal. They were not simply a backdrop for great events. Far from it, they were full center stage. This was their country. They were the ones who looked after the first Europeans, shared meals with them, traded with them, worked on construction projects with them, fought with them, signed treaties with them, and had children with them. And yet today, although the Dutch are remembered, and often celebrated, the Munsee themselves are largely forgotten or ignored, their stories untold. Yet their very stories challenge the traditional, romantic, and self-congratulatory ones so common to settler societies (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis 1995:4).

There is an emerging movement to “re-vision” (sensu Richter 1992:2) colonial/settler history and its conventional stories and to work toward a “reshaping of what scholars call American history” (Greene 2007:235; but see Zuckerman 2007) Archaeological finds made nearly a century ago at Munsee sites in New York City provide a unique opportunity to contribute to such a re-visioning and reshaping of colonial New Amsterdam. Certainly, New Amsterdam cannot be understood without considering the complex interactions between the Americans and the newcomers, the Europeans and the Africans, most of the latter enslaved. The Munsee were assuredly a vital part of that colonial world. But in considering that colonial world and its history, it is crucial to remember that the Munsee, in addition, had their own world and history.⁴ They were not simply “an appendage to colonial history” (Trigger 1984:32). Like all Native peoples, the Munsee had their own “internal dynamics and that intertribal relations and those between Indians and whites were determined by more than the colonial situation”(Trigger 1984: 32; see also Cohen 2008; DuVal 2006;and Richter 2001).

This essay focuses on two prominent Munsee, both well-known figures in New Amsterdam and in Lenapehoking.⁵ Wampage, also known as An Hoock, was a member of the Siwanoy group of Munsee who lived in what is now the Bronx. He was a patriot who fought for his homeland during Kieft’s War, one of the worst of all the North American colonial wars. Penhawitz, also known as Mechowodt and One Eye, was a member of the Canarsee group who lived in what is now Brooklyn. He was a diplomat from a powerful family who sued for peace during that conflict. Artifacts discovered in the territories of these two Americans give some clues to the actions and choices they and their contemporaries made as they worked, in the currents of change that swirled around them, to maintain their traditions, deal with increasing European ecological imperialism (cf. Crosby 1986), and forge strategic economic and political alliances with the Europeans.⁶

Although no portraits were painted of these two major seventeenth-century figures, some general descriptions of Native peoples at that time were made by contemporary Dutch chroniclers. Using these, we can imagine how an artist in those days might have depicted Penhawitz and Wampage. This imaginary artist might have painted them wearing “matchcoats,” imported woolen duffle cloth that they got in the fur trade that they had chosen to wear that day. These two Munsees leaders probably wore their trade cloth “over the right shoulder and tied in a knot around the waist and from there ....[hanging] down to the feet” (Van der Donck 2008:79–80).⁷ Under this outer garment, they would have worn a traditional hide breechclout and, on their feet, moccasins of deer or elk hide. As he painted their faces on his canvas, the Dutch artist would have copied the red and black face paint and the tattoos that they, like so many Munsee men, wore. Depending on the day that their portraits were painted, these two men may have shaven their heads on both sides, leaving a shorn middle lock to which a dyed deer hair roach or feathered circlet was attached or they may have simply braided their long scalp lock and let it hang over one shoulder (Van der Donck 2008:80–81; Jameson 1909:217). Like their relatives, friends, and neighbors, they probably oiled their bodies with bear and raccoon fat that day as protection against the elements, either the cold or the sun (Van der Donck 2008:81). And they likely had, that morning, slung around their necks a quill-embroidered notassen, or sack to keep their pipes, tobacco, and other personal items close by. A careful, observant artist might have added small strings of wampum or shell beads hanging from their ears, other wampum decorating their clothing, and pendant necklaces decorated with more wampum or metal (Goddard 1978:218).⁸ Perhaps one or the other of these leaders chose to be painted side by side with his wife, whose name, alas, was not recorded. She might have decided to wear trade cloth that day, folded as her husband’s to cover her upper body with another piece folded into “a petticoat” that she had embroidered with wampum. She would have held her hair back with a head band, also embroidered with wampum, with more wampum circling her waist and wrists and dangling from her ears (Van der Donck 2008:79–80). But however Penhawitz and Wampage may have chosen to present themselves that day had they, in fact, stood for a portrait, the gaze each would have given the artist and those who, down the centuries, viewed the paintings, would have been that of a proud and confident man, one who saw himself as equal to all, subservient to none (cf. Van der Donck 2008:80).

Some Monster of the Sea

Oral tradition has it that when the Munsee saw a European ship in their waters, they wondered if it was “some monster of the sea” (Jameson 1909:293; see also Heckewelder 1841). And in many ways they may have been right. This “monster” almost certainly refers to the Halve Maen, the ship that Henry Hudson sailed into New York harbor in 1609. That voyage was marked by exchanges of goods and violence, both heralds of the trade and bloodshed in the century ahead. The area’s potential for the fur trade was quickly realized and Dutch traders soon followed Hudson into Lenapehoking. In the 1620s, the Dutch West India Company acquired a trade monopoly in the new colony of New Netherland and “the monster of the sea” began to settle down in Lenapehoking. Although the details of the first European settlement of what would become New York City have been lost (Jacobs 2005:42), roughly it seems that in 1624 (or 1623) the Company sent a small group to lay claim to New Netherland. Some from that party were left on what is now Governors Island, in New York Harbor, one of the finest natural harbors in North America. The island, a stone’s throw from Manhattan, was in Canarsee territory and was known to the Munsee as Pagannack and had been a fishing camp for generations of Native peoples. It was renamed Noten Eylandt (Nut Island) by the European newcomers who promptly set up both a trading post and an entrepot there. Later, the company decided to shift operations to the tip of Manhattan island. Peter Minuit, the director of the colony at that time, worked with Munsee leaders to “buy” the island of Manhattan in 1626. The settlement of New Amsterdam, a raw European outpost in the middle of Indian country, had now begun.⁹ In these early years of coexistence, the Munsee did not yet realize that they were perceived as selling the land in the European sense, that is permanently alienating themselves from it. Rather, they thought they were simply allowing the Europeans to use it for a while. This basic cultural misunderstanding was one among the many causes of the wars yet to come (Cantwell and Wall 2001:142–133, 297–298, 2010; Grumet 1986; Herbster 2007; Jacobs 2005:42–44; Siversten 2007:220–221; and Van Laer 1924:260, n.8).

Initially, there were peaceful and cordial relations between the newcomers and their Indian hosts. The Munsee incorporated the Dutch into their traditional systems of helping and sharing. But within a few decades the Europeans were more self-sufficient, more arrogant, and they no longer needed the help of their Indian neighbors, whose land had now been hunted out of beaver. Some, in fact, saw them as in the way. For many Europeans, as Trelease has argued (Trelease 1960:xiii), the local Algonquians had become the expendable Indians, with whom the Dutch were competing for land, while the Mohawk, one of the Iroquoian Nations to the North, remained the valuable Indians, the allies with whom the Dutch were cooperating in the all important fur trade.¹⁰

Conflict was probably inevitable given the different Algonquian and European world views. Some were related to the inevitable daily cultural misunderstandings, others to their very different concepts towards land and animals. Dutch farm animals such as pigs and cattle wandered freely, sometimes destroying Indian crops. Indian dogs, in turn, bothered European free-ranging livestock. There were instances of cheating, drunkenness, and theft on all sides which led to arguments and often violent resolutions. There were also more complex problems stimulated by the European arrivals and the fur trade that sometimes led to conflicts among various Indian groups competing with each other for highly desirable European trade goods, hunting territories for furs to use in trade, or access to trade routes. Native peoples soon found themselves involved in an entirely new form of warfare, whereby Europeans would massacre entire communities, destroy villages and farmland, and burn stored harvested crops (Haefeli 1991; Merwick 2005, 2006; Otto 2006; Starna 2003; Trelease 1960;Williams 1995). One of the most infamous of these conflicts was Kieft’s War (1640–1645), named after Willem Kieft, the Director-General of New Netherland at that time. In the midst of that war, a massacre of Indian peoples took place that ranks as one of the most brutal in colonial America. Among the principals were Kieft and the colony’s secretary, Cornelis van Tienhoven. Although some colonists agreed with them, others most decidedly did not. The disagreements over the war ultimately led to the recall of Kieft and the appointment of Peter Stuyvesant as Director.¹¹

At the end of February 1643, hundreds of terrified Munsee began streaming into New Amsterdam looking for asylum. They had fled many miles through deep snows to escape deadly attacks, from other tribute-seeking Indian groups, on their settlements in what is now Westchester. The Munsee families moved into refugee camps near relatives, one to the northeast of the Dutch fort at Corlears Hook and the other just across the Hudson River at Pavonia. At first, the Dutch helped them with food and shelter but Kieft had long been determined “to break the mouths of the Indians” (Jameson 1909:227) and he saw this as his opportunity. Although some colonists, like David Pietersz de Vries, urged patience and humanity in dealing with these frightened people who had arrived in the dead of a fierce winter, Kieft and his allies ignored them and ordered a midnight attack on the refugee groups at a time when they would be sleeping.

De Vries later described that night’s horror at the Pavonia refugee camp:

I remained that night at the Governor’s, sitting … by the kitchen fire, when about midnight I heard a great shrieking, and I ran to the ramparts of the fort, and looked over to Pavonia. Saw nothing but firing, and heard the shrieks of the savages murdered in their sleep… When it was day the soldiers returned to the fort, having massacred or murdered eighty Indians …in their sleep; where infants were torn from their mother’s breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards [cradle boards or carriers] were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown—children from five to six years of age, and also some old and decrepit persons. Those who fled from this onslaught, and concealed themselves in the neighboring sedge, and when it was morning, came out to beg a piece of bread, and to be permitted to warm themselves, were murdered in cold blood and tossed into the fire or the water. Some came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms, and others had such horrible cuts and gashes, that worse than they were could never happen (Jameson 1909; 227–28).¹²

All told, over 120 Munsee are reported to have been butchered that night.¹³ Those who carried out the slaughter returned to Fort Amsterdam bringing with them thirty prisoners as well as the heads of some of the Munsee refugees who had been killed in the attack. Amidst the protests of a number of the colonists, Kieft congratulated the soldiers and freebooters. As for the imprisoned Munsee who had survived that dreadful night, some were enslaved and either handed over as rewards to the soldiers who had captured them or sent to Bermuda as gifts to the governor of that island.

Penhawitz, a prominent Canarsee leader from a powerful family, quickly tried to quell the violence. He sent envoys bearing a white flag to Fort Amsterdam to find out why the Dutch had killed some of his people when he had done “nothing but favors” to the Dutch (Jameson 1909:230) and convened a peace conference in what is now Brooklyn. One sachem, whose name was not recorded, detailed the Americans’ grievances against the Dutch. According to De Vries, one of the Dutch emissaries at the conference, the sachem spoke of

how we [i.e. Dutch] first came upon their coast; that we sometimes had no victuals; they gave us their Turkish beans and Turkish wheat, they helped us with oysters and fish to eat, and now for a reward we had killed their people. … He related also that at the beginning of our voyaging there, we left our people behind with the goods to trade, until the ships should come back; they had preserved these people like the apple of their eye; yea, they had given them their daughters to sleep with, by whom they had begotten children, and there roved many an Indian who was begotten by a Swanneken [European], but our people [i.e. Dutch] had become so villainous as to kill their own blood (Jameson 1909:230–31).

The Munsee gave strings of wampum to the Dutch envoys as a sign of friendship and peace and, together, they went to Fort Amsterdam to try to prevent the conflict from escalating. But any peace was short-lived. Despite the attempts of De Vries and Penhawitz, the massacres set in motion a series of raids and counter raids in which, as in all such situations, everyone lost.

This particular war raged on and off for two more long years. During its course one of the most famous women in Colonial America, Anne Hutchinson, was killed. Banished in 1638 from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her antinomian doctrines, she eventually came to New Netherland along with her family and several followers and established a plantation, known as Anne’s Hoeck or Neck, in Siwanoy territory, which is now part of the Bronx. Her land was part of a Dutch grant to which the Siwanoy had not been part. In fact, a delegation from the resident Siwanoy went to her plantation and, taking the tools from the workmen who were building her house, urged her and her group to leave (Bolton 1920:32).

In the September following the refugee killings at Pavonia and Corlaers Hook, Hutchinson’s plantation was attacked and burned. She, along with most of her family and followers, was murdered. Her killing was unusual for, as Adriaen van der Donck, a Dutch contemporary noted (2008:101) it was not common for the Indians to kill women and children. In fact, Hutchinson’s daughter was taken by the Munsees to live with them. A young Munsee patriot, Wampage, reportedly took credit for Hutchinson’s death and, following tradition, took a variant of her name as his own. And that name, An hoock, placed after the mark “A H”, appears on a number of deeds, including the one in 1692 conveying most of Siwanoy territory to the freeholders of Westchester (see below) (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1

The mark of An Hoock, a prominent Munsee leader who was also known as Wampage  

Other-World Grandfathers

The historical documents pay scarce heed to Munsee life during these tumultuous years. There are, however, a few archaeological sites in Wampage’s and Penhawitz’s territories, dug or collected nearly a century ago, using the archaeological techniques of the time, that provide clues to understanding the Americans’ materiality during that turbulent period. These clues come from a bare handful of artifacts—arrowheads made from European metals—that both shaped, and were shaped by, traditional ideology. The arrowheads were found at Weir Creek and Ryders Pond.¹⁴

The Weir Creek site, in the Throgs Neck section of the modern Bronx, had been occupied on and off for at least six thousand years.¹⁵ It was dug first in 1900 by M. R. Harrington, then working for the American Museum of Natural History. Later, in 1918, Alanson Skinner and Amos Oneroad excavated there for the Museum of the American Indian, now the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. All three archaeologists are important figures in the history of American archaeology. They were among the first professionals to work in the United States. Notably, Oneroad was also one of the first Native American archaeologists. Skinner argued that in the seventeenth century Weir Creek was an isolated camp to which the Siwanoys had retreated at the height of Kieft’s War (1919:51).

Artifacts from the Ryders Pond site, in the Marine Park section of modern Brooklyn, were gathered up a century ago by local farmers as they plowed their fields. By some accounts, they collected over 900 spear points as well as countless other tools and ceramics. One local farmer and collector, D. B. Austin, reportedly also found a number of Indian graves there, spaced at regular intervals of 35 ft. Around the same time, construction workers were putting in roads in that area and local residents noted that they too came across about a dozen burials, covered with shell, and likely all were Native American. A half a century after these finds, two avocational archaeologists, Julius Lopez and Stanley Wiesniewski, managed to track down some of the hundreds of artifacts that Austin and his cohort had found. But because of the way the artifacts had been collected in the first place and the lack of any records, all they could do was to catalog the finds. Their efforts, however, made it clear that Ryders Pond is a place, like Weir Creek, where generations of Indian families had lived, worked, and buried their dead at various times over a period of at least six thousand years (Bolton 1920, 1922; Lopez and Wisniewski 1978a, b).

Native peoples were certainly living at Ryders Pond in the seventeenth century in a substantial settlement with fields of maize, beans, and squash with a burial ground nearby. The area was probably then known as Shanscomacocke (Bolton 1922:159–61). Historical accounts suggest that a longhouse once stood there, but no traces of it have been found.¹⁶ Some scholars believe that the residents at Shanscomacocke were joined after Keift’s War by relatives who had been living in Keshaechquereren, an important Canarsee seventeenth-century settlement in what is today Flatbush in Brooklyn. Keshaechquereren, according to tradition, was the main council place where Indians from this part of Long Island gathered for major meetings and religious ceremonies. But at the height of the war, its residents fled their homes to avoid being caught up in the hostilities. When the war was over, they came to Shanscomacocke, today’s Ryders Pond site, and settled with their relatives and friends who were already living there (Lopez and Wisniewski 1978a, b; Pickman 2000; Van Wyck 1924; Wall and Cantwell 2004).

For archaeologists frustrated by the cavalier destruction of the city’s archaeological sites over the years, these few seventeenth-century metal arrowheads, recovered nearly 100 years ago at Weir Creek and Ryders Pond, in the territories of Wampage and Penhawitz, give us one of the very few opportunities we have to understand the creative nature of Munsee trading and decision making during the early years of their encounters with Europeans. These copper and brass points were not trade items in their own right. They, and other weapons like them, were carefully crafted by Indian armourers throughout the Northeast from metals recycled from European trade kettles that had been exchanged for furs, corn, or other commodities. In fact, Native people on Staten Island, friendly with De Vries, once asked him for his copper kettle so that they could “make darts for their arrows” (Jameson 1909:229). Although European guns and metal trade goods such as knives, kettles, and axes were highly valued by Indians for their practical and prestige qualities, many anthropologists now argue that the metals themselves, copper and brass, were important not only because they were useful but also because they fit easily into traditional value systems (Bradley 1987; Hamell 1983, 1987; and Miller and Hamell 1986). Native copper had been important in Indian beliefs for thousands of years and been traded throughout eastern North America long before the Europeans came with their own trade offerings (Cantwell 1984; Seeman 1979; Winters 1968). It had mythical origins, was associated with exchanges with extremely powerful spiritual beings, including other-world Grandfathers such as horned serpents. These gifts from the spirit world could assure long life, physical and spiritual well-being, and success, especially in hunting, fishing, warfare, and courtship (Hamell 1983, 1987; and Miller and Hamell 1986). No wonder, then, that these metals had such great power in the ritual and social lives of the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples throughout the Northeast. They wanted copper because its power was so intimately related to the very concept of life itself for them, as for many Indian peoples, “history had long been the realm in which dreams and myths took on a tangible form” (White 1991:523).

It seems likely that the supernatural powers long associated with native metals were transferred to the newly acquired European metals they resembled. If so, then these metal points may be the material form of the continuing importance of traditional concepts of spiritual power in the daily lives of Munsee people at that time. These points are also a powerful reminder that European commodities held multiple meanings for Indian peoples. European objects were not necessarily valuable because they were somehow seen as superior to traditional goods. They may sometimes have been sought out for the very reason that they resembled objects that were already valuable in their social and spiritual lives long before the Europeans arrived with their trade goods. These goods were simply domesticated or “indigenized” and went on to play an active role in a continuing Indian history.

Kieft’s War marked a turning point in the relationship between the Americans and the Europeans. In the early years of the New Netherland colony, the area somewhat resembled what Richard White in his seminal study (1991) called a “Middle Ground,” a period of “mutual invention,” a common ground in which both groups tried “to follow normal conventions of behavior” with neither side having a real advantage and violence at a minimum (1991:50–52; see also Cantwell 2008; Gosden 2004; Silliman 2005; White 2006).¹⁷ This was a period of sociality, hybridity, and creativity for all groups along the coast. And these metal arrowheads remind us of those early, relatively benign, years of early contact between the Americans and the Europeans. In those years, Indian Country and New Amsterdam were distinguished by “a rough balance of power, a mutual need or a desire for what the other possesses, and an inability by either side to commandeer enough force to compel the other to change” (White 2006:10).

In the aftermath of the war all of that dramatically changed. New Netherland was now being transformed into a settler colony, slavery was more established (Cantwell and Wall 2008b), and colonialism consequently took on a different, darker, form.¹⁸ Certainly from the point of the Americans, the situation had now greatly deteriorated. The Mohawks were the preferred trading partner, now that coastal hunting grounds were being rapidly depleted, and the Munsee were becoming more and more marginalized. In some ways, colonialism had changed into, and approached, what Chris Gosden termed a terra nullius form, that is a colonialism where colonial powers showed a “lack of recognition of prior ways of life of people encountered which leads to excuses for mass appropriations of land, destruction of social relations and death through war and disease” (2004:26). Nevertheless, although the Dutch were appropriating land for their expanding settler society, they remained scrupulous in buying the land; however the two sides may have understood such purchases. Therefore, the term terra nullius seems inappropriate for this growing erosion of the common ground in New Netherland that took place in the aftermath of the war and perhaps the designation terra afflicta is more appropriate (Cantwell 2008).

We Ought to People the Country

Irrevocable changes were taking place in Lenapehoking in the wake of the war and the land itself was being transformed.¹⁹ Hints of these dramatic changes come from two sites in Wampage’s territory, Weir Creek and Clasons Point. Like Weir Creek, the neighboring Clasons Point site was dug by Skinner and Oneroad, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Skinner argued that this was the site of Snakapins, a seventeenth-century Siwanoy settlement of some sixty families and he believed that some of these families had relocated for a time to Weir Creek to hide from the ongoing Dutch raids during Kieft’s War. At both these sites, he and Oneroad found pig and cattle bones (Skinner 1919: 113, 118, 123; Bolton 1919).²⁰

We don’t know how the bones of these particular European domesticated animals wound up mingled with other, more traditional, Munsee household refuse at the sites. The meat could have been given, bought, stolen, or the livestock raised by the community—there are accounts that suggest all of these possibilities. But no matter how this meat got there to be incorporated into the indigenous diet, these faunal remains bring home the profound and irrevocable economic and ecological changes taking place on this afflicted land.

These changes were many, varied, and, as always, interconnected. Colonization itself took place near the end of the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1550–1700), whose effects on local ecosystems are little known but surely are an important part of the story (Brose et al. 2001:7; Pederson et al. 2005). Firewood was essential for everyone at that time and yet there are reports in the colonial documents that by mid-century firewood itself was scarce. Council documents show that colonists in New Amsterdam were even reduced to cutting down palisades, for which they were punished, for fuel during this time of “sharp and bitter cold” (Gerhing 1995 xiii, 4–5).

As the colonial settlements grew after the war and New Netherland became a settler colony, increasing numbers of Dutch settlers, some bringing enslaved Africans along with them, began expanding more and more into areas traditionally used by the Munsee. In addition, the Dutch established a community of enslaved Africans just outside of New Amsterdam, further keeping the Munsee at a distance and controlling their movements (Cantwell and Wall 2008, 2010; Gehring 1980; Siversten 2007; Van Zandt 1998).²¹ All these newcomers, settler and enslaved, were involved one way or another in cutting down forests for fuel and lumber; clearing fields; as well as planting European gardens and crops and grazing European domesticated animals, both alien to the area. In some cases, overcropping exhausted the land (Schaefer and Janowitz 2005; Van Laer 1908:331).

European livestock did more than damage Munsee crops and provoke conflicts. Their impact becomes clear, as William Cronon has argued for neighboring New England, “when they are treated as integral elements in a complex system of environmental and cultural relationships. The pig was not merely a pig but a creature bound among other things to the fence, the dandelion, and a very special definition of property” (1983:14). European animals, farming practices, and concepts of property drastically altered local Native ecosystems. This meant that the habitats of many of the animals that the Munsee had traditionally hunted and the plant communities on which they had depended were destroyed. They now had to find new and innovative strategies to deal with a changing landscape (Cantwell and Wall 2010).

Compounding these ecological problems was the tense climate of ongoing conflict. Not only did this frequently take energies away from customary activities, but both Munsee and Dutch crops were on occasion destroyed as part of the mutual punitive nature of these conflicts (Jameson 1909:209, 277; Merwick 2005; Williams 1995). Adding to this was the fact that the Europeans now began controlling Munsee movements in their own homeland, further disrupting their traditional economies (e.g. Siversten 2007:221; Stokes 1915–1928: I 86–7).

And so these pig and cattle bones found in Wampage’s territory suggest that acquiring European animals and perhaps other foods, by whatever means, may have become one way of replacing traditional foods now hard to come by. We don’t know how quickly or to what extent the Munsees incorporated these alien foods into their diet—we simply haven’t any properly dug sites to give us that information. But these few bones, nonetheless, are the tangible clues that suggest the enormity of some of the upheavals and the resulting conflicts that the Munsee faced: the demands of tribute and trade; the causes and consequences of war; the competition over land; the destruction of traditional ecosystems and economies; the increasing size of settlements along the shore; the encroaching Dutch farms; and their increasing dependence on colonists whose own interests and economies were totally incompatible with theirs.

What William Cronon writes of New England applies to New York as well:

[A] distant world and its inhabitants gradually [became] part of another people’s ecosystem, so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to know which ecosystem is interacting with which culture. … They rapidly came to inhabit a single world, but in the process the landscape … was so transformed that the Indian’s earlier way of interacting with their environment became impossible (1983:14–15).

The entangled effects of trade, war, the increasing size of the settler society and its needs, and changing ecosystems were only part of the turmoil. The most catastrophic and irrevocable agents of change were biological ones, the European diseases that killed countless Munsee and other Indian peoples. It is difficult to estimate the exact number of Indian people who died along the coast during these epidemics. In 1656, New Netherlander Adriaen van der Donck reported that his Indian neighbors told him that before the European arrivals and before small pox broke out amongst them, they had been far more numerous. By mid-century, they said “there is now barely one for every ten” of their former population (Van der Donck 2008:69). Modern estimates of Munsee deaths from these diseases range from 50% to as high as 91% (Grumet 1989a, 1990; Snow and Lamphear 1988). But whatever the actual numbers may have been, this widowing of the Native landscape,²² was an enormous demographic and personal catastrophe with profound social and economic consequences (Jones 2003; Starna 1992) and the central role of that tragedy in the stories of the Munsee and of the Dutch colony has to be acknowledged and understood.

Under the Blue Canopy of Heaven

Kieft’s War ended with the signing of a peace treaty at Fort Amsterdam on August 30, 1645 “under the blue canopy of heaven” (O’Callaghan and Fernow 1856–1883 XIII:18). Present at the signing was Penhawitz’s son, Meautinnemin. One of the conditions of that treaty was that Anne Hutchinson’s daughter, who had been captured during Wampage’s raid on her plantation several years earlier, be returned to the English. The Munsee were as reluctant to return her as she was to being redeemed. They had become very attached to each other in the intervening years and did not wish to part (Salisbury 1982; Shonnard and Spooner 1900).

There is little further mention of Penhawitz in the written records. Although some scholars (e.g. Grumet 1995b:33) suggested that he died in battle at Fort Neck on Long Island during Kieft’s War, his death is not documented. His son, Meautinnemin, later known as Tackapausha, became the sachem or leader for the Massapequa, a western Long Island group. He took his father’s place as a major figure and diplomat in New Netherland and an ally of the Dutch.²³ In fact, in 1655, when he sent an intermediary to meet with his counterpart, Peter Stuyvesant, Stuyvesant declared

that in the former differences between their sachem and our nation … the present sachem’s father, called ‘one eye,’ [Penhawitz] had directed and ordered his son, now called Tachpaussa [sic] to make peace with the Dutch and … to keep it, and that he should forget for the future what had happened and that he must not for this reason, shed any more blood in the future. The present sachem has obeyed the command of his father, and has done no harm to the Dutch nation, not even to the value of a dog, and he still intended to continue doing so” (Gehring 1995:145).

In return for Tackapausha’s support, Stuyvesant promised to build him a house or fort that “would be furnished with Indian trade or Commodities” (Hicks 1896–1904, 1:4344). That promised fort is almost surely the Fort Massapeag site, at Fort Neck, in Massapequa on Long Island (Solecki 2006). Fort Massapeag, excavated by Ralph Solecki and colleagues, is a mid-seventeenth century quadrangular earthwork, 100’ square, with two bastions, and a palisade made from red pine, the posts shaped with metal axes. It is not certain from the archaeological finds whether the fort was built by the Dutch, enslaved Africans, the Indians, or some combination of these groups. There was also a nearby Indian village, possibly contemporary, that was destroyed by modern development and little is known of it. At the fort proper, Solecki found areas where wampum was made as well as numerous mid-century Dutch trade goods such as mouth harps and pipes, and a host of other, Native, artifacts (Cantwell and Wall 2001; Solecki 2006). This trading post/fort, facing a salt meadow with easy access to the Great South Bay and from there to the Long Island coast and New York harbor, might well have been one of the remaining pockets of the middle ground that still functioned in coastal New Netherland, a place where Indians still had autonomy, social relationships and alliances between the various groups could be formed or maintained, trading opportunities evaluated, and attempts at understanding made (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2

The Historic Marker at Fort Massapeag (2008). (Photo Credit: Diana diZerega Wall)

Tackapausha remained a firm ally of Stuyvesant and, working under the earlier rules of accommodation and exchange, agreed to help him in the mid-Hudson Valley Esopus Wars (1659–1660 and 1663–1664) in return for booty and gifts that included duffle for his warriors, a coat for himself, as well as, perhaps, protection from neighboring New England tribes and the English settlers on the eastern end of the island. His men joined a larger Dutch force on several forays against the Algonquian-speaking Esopus Indians. Some scholars think that his younger brother, Chopeyconnaus, was part of that military force. In any case, at the end of the Esopus Wars, Chopeyconnaus was one of the dignitaries at Fort Amsterdam on May 15, 1664 to witness the signing of that peace treaty. Over the years, Penhawitz’s sons, Tackapausha and Chopeyconnaus, along with other family members, sold the land that made up Fort Neck, with the last parcel sold in1697 (O’Callaghan and Fernow 1856–1883 XIII: 284, 285, 286, 295–296, 375; Strong 1997: 284). There is genealogical evidence suggesting that Chopeyconnaus (and, therefore, Penhawitz) may have descendants living today among the members of the Shinnecock Nation at the eastern end of Long Island (Strong 1998:71–72).²⁴

Wampage, under the name of An Hoock, is mentioned on a number of deeds including the one that sold most of the land that now makes up the modern borough of the Bronx to the freeholders of Westchester on May 27, 1692 (Bolton 1920; McNamara 1984). That land, which ranged from the Bronx to the Hutchinson Rivers, was sold for “ 2 gunns, 2 adzes, 2 kettles, 2 shirts, 2 coats, I barrel of cider, 6 bitts of money” and, in addition, six shillings had been put aside for the Indians’ expenses and another three shillings for the costs of the supper, of which Wampage likely partook. The meal was provided for the Americans on the occasion of the signing of the deed (Bolton 1919:78).

Wampage’s fate has become the stuff of legend. One legend, still circulated by some guides at Pelham Manor, a historic house in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, claims that Wampage’s granddaughter, the “Indian Princess,” married Thomas Pell II, the third lord of Pelham Manor (e.g. Barr 1946). Although this gives a satisfying, romantic Hollywood ending to the tempestuous stories of the seventeenth century, there is, alas, no documentary evidence to support it.²⁵ The other legend focuses on an archaeological find, made in the early 1800s. The find was made by local antiquarians exploring Pelham Bay Park two hundred years ago. They were digging in a mound near the water’s edge that was popularly known as the place where An Hoock had been buried a century before, in the early 1700s. When they opened the mound, they discovered “a large sized skeleton, by the side of which lay the stone axe and flint spear of the tenant of the grave” (Bolton 1881:517). Intrigued by the report of the discovery of what could be An Hoock’s grave, M. R. Harrington, working much later, went back to the area in 1899 to look for more evidence of the burial of one of the best known figures in seventeenth-century Lenapehoking. Luck was not with him. He found that that part of the site had already been worn away. In 1918 Skinner found that the whole knoll itself had been carried off by the relentless coastal tides. (Skinner 1919:116). But if the antiquarians and local legends are right, Wampage had been buried in a traditional way, among his people, in his ancestral homeland.²⁶

Meanwhile, the destructive forces of an expanding settler society that needed more and more land, not only changed traditional ecosystems and subsistence strategies but ultimately led to the piece by piece sale of the now afflicted Lenapehoking. Leaders like Wampage or Penhawitz and his sons, seized the initiative and played a delicate game negotiating land sales and hoping to buy time to make decisions for their future, maintain hunting or fishing rights, “buy European protection and forbearance” and “obligate…[ the Europeans] to reciprocate in other ways” (Grumet 1989b:4). Anthropologist Robert Grumet has argued that these carefully thought out strategies of leaders like Wampage and the Penhawitz family “enabled the Lenape to not only survive the loss of their homeland, but to endure as a distinct people to the present day” (1989b:5).

By the end of the seventeenth-century, the surviving Munsee were largely gone from what is now the modern city of New York. By the middle of the following century, they were largely gone from Lenapehoking itself—their diaspora into the interior of the continent well underway.²⁷ And the omen, so jarring to the modern ear, that David de Vries thought he saw on the shores,—“ In the summer-time crabs come on the flat shores, of very good taste. Their claws are of the color of the flag of our Prince, orange, white, and blue, so that the crabs show sufficiently that we ought to people the country, and that it belongs to us “—had come true, but not for long (Jameson 1909:223). Before the century ended, New Netherland itself had become New York.

Where My Roots Are

The stories of Wampage, Penhawitz, their families, their Native contemporaries, and the worlds they dominated are offered as part of an attempt to re-vision colonial New Amsterdam. Their stories are an integral part of the reshaping of that conventional narrative and cast a fresh light into the complexity of the inter-cultural encounters of that time. But, their stories are part of other narratives as well. As Paul Cohen has pointed out, although Native history certainly informs colonial history, it is not confined to it (2008:408–9). The Americans were major actors in European colonial history but they were also actors in other worlds as well. In fact, a closer reading of the historical documents and the scant handful of artifacts recovered from century-old archaeological excavations suggests that in all of this, as Gilles Havard said of other Native people, Wampage, Penhawitz, and their families and contemporaries were likely “far from seeing themselves as actors on the European periphery, [but] believed themselves instead to be at the center of the world” (2003:50 cited in Cohen 2008:408).²⁸ New York has many stories.

Information gleaned from both documents and at archaeological sites such as Weir Creek and Ryders Pond show that Native traders in New Amsterdam were astute consumers of European goods. They carefully traded for European metal artifacts that fit easily into their own value systems and then creatively transformed them for their own purposes. Arrowheads made of these recycled European materials, with their associations to other-world grandfathers, both revitalized, and were shaped by, their belief systems. This hybrid weaponry may have given them the spiritual power they desired at that time (cf. Liebmann 2008).

At the height of Kieft’s War, some Native leaders, such as Penhawitz, tried to quell the violence. Others, such as Wampage, chose to fight. In either case, families living in large unprotected villages in their territories, such as those at Snakapins (the Clasons Point site) or at Keshaechquereren, may have elected to make critical settlement shifts and moved to more secure locations. Skinner believed that some families from Snakapins relocated to what is now the Weir Creek site to avoid ongoing Dutch raids. He further suggested that they removed some of their dead from their graves at Snakapins when they moved and then reburied them at their new home at Weir Creek (Skinner 1919:114). Historical documents suggest that in the midst of the war, families living at Keshaechquereren moved to safer places and then, at war’s end, joined family and friends at Shanscomacoke (the Ryders Pond site).

Penhawitz’s son, Tackapausha, continued his father’s pragmatic diplomacy and formed a mutually beneficial alliance with Peter Stuyvesant. Tackapausha supported the Dutch in the Esopus Wars for booty, other commodities, and protection from English and other Native groups. As part of his strategic politics, he secured a trading post/fort (the Fort Massapeag site) where his people could, in safety, trade and have the opportunities to make other kinds of alliances.

The expanding, slave-owning, settler society that New Amsterdam now was had, probably without intending to,²⁹ radically transformed traditional Munsee ecosystems and subsistence strategies. Disease and conflict compounded these ills and the settlers’ hunger for land led, ultimately, to land dispossession for the Munsee. Although leaders like Wampage or the Penhawitz family carefully crafted land deals that would give them time and protection, by the end of the century many of the surviving Munsee had begun their own westward journeys to the interior, looking for new places to live. It is there that some, but not all, of their modern stories lie (Kraft 2001).

Today New York is a world capital populated by millions of people whose own homelands span the globe while many of the descendants of its seventeenth-century Native residents are now living all over the continent. Archaeological discoveries, made on Ellis Island in the 1980s, of human remains deemed to be Native American brought some members of the Munsee and Delaware diaspora back to their homeland. Working closely with the National Park Service, representatives of the Munsee and Delaware returned to New York on several occasions—for blessing ceremonies, some of which were in the Munsee language, and for the eventual reburial of the bones of those who literally or metaphorically, may have been their ancestors (Cantwell 1992–1993, 2000; Crespi 1987; Wall and Cantwell 2004).

The human remains were discovered during renovations of the Main Building on the island in preparation for the opening of the Museum of Immigration (Pousson 1986; Wall and Cantwell 2004). The discovery, analysis, subsequent blessings, and reburials of these human remains on Ellis Island, itself a national icon of the American immigrant experience, became enveloped in important issues of memory, identity, ethics, social justice, history, and spirituality (Cantwell 2000; Cantwell and Wall 2010). The ceremonies and simple grave markers of these individuals, whose names and stories we do not know (nor even whose dates are certain, see Cantwell 2000) but were here before the European encounters, further challenge the conventional histories of a settler society where history begins with the European arrivals. They underline the fact that this entire area was Native land long before there was a United States and long before millions of immigrants passed through Ellis Island on their way to becoming citizens of that new nation (Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3

Munsee grave markers on Ellis Island. The vertical markers honor the men and the cruciform markers honor the women who are buried there (Photo credit: Anne-Marie Cantwell)

Linda Poolaw, then Vice-President of the Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma, recounted her voyage back to her homeland for “the honor of viewing the bones” at one of the first blessing ceremonies in 1987. She writes, “Way above the clouds, looking down on the ground I was trying to imagine my ancestors crossing all over that land from the East Coast. How difficult it must have been....I imagined that this was where my roots are and my people, the remains of the people I was going to view in a few hours being proof of that” (1987:29). At a later ceremony, Edward Thompson, also from the descendant group, told a reporter that “We’re preparing them to live forever and ever in tranquility” (Bloom 1987:21). The human remains were subsequently reburied in May 2003 at a private ceremony on the island in the presence of representatives of the descendant group who came from various parts of the United States and Canada (Cantwell 1992, 2000; Wall and Cantwell 2004). One of the views from the graves is of the tip of the island of Manhattan, just a short boat ride away. The name of that island is one of the few surviving relics of the seventeenth-century world that Pehanwitz and Wampage dominated. It is also a reminder of the countless Native New York stories yet to be uncovered and told.