EGN NEWS DESK
In the language of the Lenape Indigenous individuals, the phrase for European explorers who crossed the Atlantic within the seventeenth century to choose their lands was “shuwankook,” or “salty individuals.”
The time period first utilized to the Dutch, mentioned Brent Stonefish, a Native American religious chief, as a result of they emerged from the ocean to first commerce with, then exploit and kill, his Lenape ancestors.
“The Dutch have been mainly those that ran us out of our homeland, they usually have been very violent towards our individuals,” he mentioned in an interview. “As far as I used to be involved, they have been the savages.”
So, when the Dutch Consulate in New York approached Stonefish to ask if he’d assist commemorate the anniversary of the 1624 institution of the primary Dutch settler colony, New Amsterdam, he was shocked.
“They needed us to have fun 400 years of New Amsterdam, and we’re like, ‘No, that’s not going to occur,’” he mentioned. “At the identical time, I assumed it was an academic alternative,” he added. “We had plenty of laborious discussions.”
The Dutch Consulate, which was creating an occasions program across the anniversary known as Future 400, then linked Stonefish with the Museum of the City of New York and the Amsterdam Museum, an historic museum within the Netherlands.
The result’s the exhibition, “Manahahtáanung or New Amsterdam? The Indigenous Story Behind New York,” working on the Amsterdam Museum by way of Nov. 10 and shifting to the Museum of the City of New York in 2025 as “Unceded: 400 Years of Lenape Survivance.”
Imara Limon, a curator from the Amsterdam Museum, mentioned that the challenge was a real artistic collaboration between the museums and the Lenape, together with the group that Stonefish co-directs, the Eenda-Lunaapeewahkiing Collective. It felt notably essential, Limon mentioned, to current the present within the Netherlands, the place few persons are conscious of the Dutch colony’s impression on Indigenous peoples.
“It wasn’t a part of historical past courses at school,” she mentioned. “And we realized that our institutional reminiscence on this subject can be very restricted, so we wanted their tales.”
Each museum searched its holdings for materials concerning the Lenape, however discovered just a few official data. In the Amsterdam City Archives, curators found a file of an enslaved Lenape man who was dropped at the Netherlands within the seventeenth century, which is on show within the present. To complement the paperwork, the Lenape contributed artworks and conventional ceremonial artifacts.
Objects are only one a part of the present, nevertheless: The exhibition is dominated by video interviews with Lenape individuals, which run from about seven minutes to 50 minutes every.
“Usually in a museum exhibit, movies are three to 5 minutes lengthy,” Limon mentioned, “however right here we made them longer, as a result of we felt we needed to have them actually current, bodily current, within the area.”
Cory Ridgeway, a member of a Lenape group that collaborated on the present, mentioned she welcomed this strategy.
“Traditionally museums need very object-based programming, and they’re going to come to us and say, ‘Give us some stuff and we’ll discuss it,’” she mentioned. “Quite a lot of museums don’t actually credit score oral historical past as historical past, and that’s our most important type of historical past.”
Stonefish mentioned his major purpose was to indicate that the Lenape nonetheless exist, and that they nonetheless have a voice.
“The one factor we needed to convey was that we weren’t a relic below glass,” he mentioned. “We nonetheless reside and breathe, and attempt to reside good lives.”
Some 20,000 dwelling Lenape persons are descendants of an estimated inhabitants of 1 million that initially lived within the area of present-day New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
In 1609, the Dutch East India Company, one of many world’s largest service provider companies, dispatched the English explorer Henry Hudson to discover a buying and selling path to China. But Hudson veered off track and arrived within the Bay of Manhattan.
He shortly claimed the entire space between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers for the Netherlands. There, Dutch retailers engaged the Lenape in commerce for beaver pelts and different furs.
Later, the Dutch West India Company, based in 1621, established its first settlement on Governors Island in 1624, and made its colony of New Amsterdam on the tip of Manahahtáanung, what’s now Manhattan. Two years later, an organization govt, Peter Schagen, mentioned he had bought Manhattan from the Lenape for 60 guilders, or roughly $24.
The Lenape dispute that declare.
“We say that that’s a fantasy,” Stonefish mentioned. “We didn’t have an idea of possession; we had an idea of sharing the land, and having a relationship with the entire land, the animals and the vegetation. Our concept of civilization was accepting all of creation, and taking not more than what we wanted.”
In the exhibition, this myth-busting is represented by a wampum belt, specifically created for the present. Stonefish mentioned a ceremonial belt would have been given to the Dutch as a part of any property-sharing settlement, however there was no point out of 1 within the Dutch account. “Our management wouldn’t have entered into any kind of settlement with out one thing like this,” he mentioned.
For about twenty years, commerce continued between the Dutch and the Indigenous individuals, however in 1643, the New Netherlands governor Willem Kieft ordered the bloodbath of the Lenape and different tribes dwelling within the colony.
A two-year struggle ensued, throughout which a minimum of 1,000 Lenape have been killed. Kieft was ordered to return to the Netherlands to reply for his actions, however died in a shipwreck.
The West India Company appointed Peter Stuyvesant as Kieft’s successor, and he managed New Netherland till the English conquered the territory in 1664, and renamed it New York. The Dutch colony lasted simply 50 years.
Ridgeway, the member of the Lenape group, mentioned that, for her, making reference to the “salty individuals” was a possibility to provoke discussions with the Dutch authorities about therapeutic the previous’s wounds.
“I might like to see an apology, and I want to see reparations,” she mentioned. “It could be used for our language, which is almost extinct, in order that it may be spoken once more, and for our elders. The majority of our persons are dwelling under the poverty stage immediately.”
Her husband, Chief Urie Ridgeway, mentioned the story of his individuals had been largely erased from American historical past books, but it surely has been transmitted by way of storytelling by generations of survivors. “We know our histories, however now we’re beginning to share them.”
He added that the present exhibition provides the Lenape an opportunity to inform a narrative that has lengthy been ignored. “It’s about time,” he mentioned.
