New York City, Early History

Before Europeans came to the place now known as New York City, it had been the home of Native Americans of the Algonquian language group. Literally hundreds of these self-governing bands lived along the East Coast from North Carolina to Canada. At least 18 of them lived in the New York City area. The Canarsees, who were especially prominent in what is now Brooklyn, had settlements in present-day Gowanus, Sheepshead Bay, Flatlands, and Canarsie.

Although these local groups were not as advanced as the Maya, Inca, or Aztecs, who lived farther south in the western hemisphere, they lived in peace with nature and with each other. They constructed long bark houses, replete with thatched domes, of substantial size, and they planted wheat, maize, beans, and squash. Many modern roads, such as Flatbush Avenue and Kings Highway, follow the route of paths that connected the various Native American villages.

New York City, Dutch rule

Hudson discovered that the vast area between French Canada and British Virginia was unfortified and unclaimed and that the Native Americans who lived at the mouth of the Hudson River would happily trade furs for European goods. Excited by the commercial prospects of Manhattan Island, which was in the midst of a vast harbor that was ice-free in all seasons, Dutch merchants promptly dispatched other expeditions to the vicinity.

The Dutch East India Company established the first permanent European settlement in what is now New York City in 1624. Although most of the Dutch settlers established themselves in the northern Hudson Valley, near the future site of Albany, about eight or ten Protestants from Belgium, who had taken refuge with the Dutch to escape religious persecution, settled on Governors Island in New York harbor. In 1625 the tiny community moved to the southern tip of Manhattan Island. A year later, according to legend, Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan from the Canarsees for 60 guilders (approximately $24) in trinkets and goods.

Long Island, Early History

The first European to explore Long Island was English navigator Henry Hudson, who landed at Coney Island in 1609. The island was sparsely inhabited by several tribes of the Algonquin people, after whom many villages, streets, and bays on the island are named.

Manhattan, Early History

The name Manhattan is derived from an Algonquian term for “island of hills.” In 1524 the island, then inhabited by Native Americans, was probably seen by the Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano. In 1609 the English navigator Henry Hudson made an extensive exploration of the area, and the Dutch laid claim to the island on that basis. In 1624 the Dutch established a trading post on southern Manhattan Island. To secure the claim, Peter Minuit, the director general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, purchased the island from the Native Americans in 1626 for goods valued at about 60 guilders, or approximately $24. Permanent settlement began the same year at the outpost, which Minuit named New Amsterdam, and it became the administrative center of New Netherland.

Queens, Early History

The region now comprising Queens was originally inhabited by Native Americans of the Rockaway tribe. Willem Kieft, governor of New Netherland, bought large sections of the region from the Rockaways in 1639. In 1642, Dutch colonists established Maspeth (Mespat), and English settlers founded Flushing.

The Rockaway Peninsula and the North Shore became popular resort areas in the 1890s.

from:"Long Island", "Manhattan", "New York City", "Queens" Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Shinnecock

North American tribe of the Algonquian language family and of the Eastern Woodlands culture area. They were native to Long Island, New York.

After 1788 many Shinnecock formed the Brotherton band with neighboring Algonquin tribes and settled on land given to them in present-day Oneida County, New York. In 1833 they moved to Wisconsin, where they were absorbed into the local population. A small number of Shinnecock remained on Long Island.

In 1990, 1522 people in the United States claimed to be of Shinnecock descent.

"Shinnecock," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001 http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Some 550 generations across 12 millennia occupied the Island before Europeans arrived

By Steve Wick, Staff Writer

If history is a chronology of events, there is little hard evidence of the earliest inhabitants of Long Island -- a people called the Paleo-Indians. There is more about the Indians who were here when Europeans arrived -- they are called the Woodland Period Indians -- but nearly all of it was written by Dutch and English settlers. What constitutes the Indians' own writings can be seen in the mysterious symbols and squiggly lines they made on the deeds the Europeans used to claim land as their own. History you can hold in your hand has been found in the ground Long Islanders live, play and walk on -- stone utensils the Indians used in virtually every aspect of their lives.

A little-known aspect of early exploration of the North American coastline -- one certainly not discussed in social studies textbooks -- is the kidnaping of Indians from coastal communities back to Europe, where they were sold into slavery. Kidnapings appear to have begun as early as 1500, when Portugese explorers went ashore somewhere on the north Atlantic coast, grabbed 57 Indians and took them back to Portugal, where they were sold on the auction block. Two years later, English sailors landed at Newfoundland and kidnaped three Indian men as proof they had made landfall. In July, 1525, a Spanish expedition abducted 58 men and women near what is now Newport, R.I., and brought them back to Spain.

In spite of these incidents, Indians continued to greet Europeans when they arrived on their coastlines.

Except for a few spare references in some historical documents, the Indians' reaction to meeting Europeans is not known. One of them -- written nearly two centuries after the fact -- concerns the arrival in 1609 in New York Harbor of Henry Hudson, an Englishman working for the Dutch.

Many years ago, when men with a white skin had never yet been seen in this land, some Indians were out fishing at a place where the sea widens . . . espied at a great distance something remarkably large floating on the water . . . some believed it to be an uncommonly large fish or animal, while others (thought it was) a very big house floating on the sea.

For the Indians of Long Island, the journey from their discovery by outsiders to their displacement from their land was relatively short. By 1636, the Dutch began making the first land purchases on Long Island, near the present-day Brooklyn Borough Hall. Large sections of Brooklyn were purchased for trade items such as cloth, kettles, axes, hatchets, knives and awls.

In 1616, Block (another Dutchman, a lawyer-turned-explorer ) drew a map of the land the Dutch called Lange Eylandt. Block's Long Island looked like a series of islands pushed together, ending on the North Fork in a series of dots. On the south side, near where the South Fork juts out on his map, he wrote an Algonquian word, Nahicans, one of the first descriptions of Long Island Indians.

Nowhere in the Algonquian view of their world was there a provision for selling land. Nor did the Europeans believe the Indians ``owned'' land. What the Indians thought they were doing when they etched their unique marks on these deeds is not known today.

Historical records show that the Dutch relationship with the Indians in western Long Island and near their principal settlement on Manhattan was murderous. One of the largest massacres occurred in present-day Massapequa, at a site where the Indians had built a log fort for their protection. There, in 1644, an English mercenary named John Underhill, hired out to the Dutch, killed more than 120 Indian men, women and children.

Only 54 years after Block wrote ``Nahicans'' on his map, Indian life on Long Island had undergone fundamental change. In numerous accounts, observers of the day wrote that Indian villages were being decimated by diseases. Reservations were set up where Indian communities were supposed to live and plant crops. All across Long Island, evidence that a people had once lived for 500 generations had faded.

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Shinnecocks and Montauketts fight to regain areas taken in questionable deals.

The breaking of leases with the Shinnecock and Montaukett Indians, in 1859 and the early 1880s, appears today to have been accomplished by deceit, lies and possibly forgery, a Newsday examination of historical and legal records shows. While the Indians themselves raised these issues at the time, their protests were dismissed in the courts.

In the case of the Shinnecocks, an 1859 petition that asked the state Legislature to pass legislation breaking a lease that covered the Shinnecock Hills may have contained forged names, names of dead Indians and minors.

In the case of the Montauketts, an East Hampton man later admitted under oath in court that he had lied when he told the Indians that if they signed away their rights to land at Montauk Point, they still could return during summer months. But according to testimony before the same subcommittee in 1900, they were barred by force from returning, and Montauketts alleged that at least one of their homes was burned to the ground.

The breaking of the leases is not only important to historians but resonates today.

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The Evolution of Shinnecock Culture

John Strong

Culture is one of those familiar words used regularly by people in a wide variety of contexts. For the anthropologist, however, "culture" is defined as a pattern of activities, beliefs, and material artifacts common to a particular group of people (Aceves and King, 1979). A group of people do not lose their culture; it may change, but it is never lost. Culture by this definition has nothing at all to do with physical appearance. So it is with the Shinnecock people. Their culture has undergone changes, and their people have absorbed other genetic heritages, yet the culture retains its essential character.

Unfortunately, the term is not always used as carefully outside of textbooks. The English colonists viewed Indian culture as inferior and attempted to destroy it as quickly as they could. There is an ironic twist to this theme here on Long Island. During the seventeenth century the 'uncivilized" aspects of Indian culture were used as a justification for taking away Indian land. The colonists argued that because the Indians had no intention of making the land productive through application of agriculture and technology, they had forfeited their title. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the rationale was reversed. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward the Shinnecock were threatened with the assertion that they had "lost their culture" and had, therefore, weakened their claim to their ancestral lands.

"Culture" and "blood" were blended into one concept by nineteenth century writers in spite of the fact that blood has nothing to do with either appearance or culture. One observer after another proclaimed the epitaph of the last "pureblooded" Shinnecock. When Mary Wacus died in 1867 at the age of 100, a town official recorded the following words by her name: "the last full-blooded squaw and the oldest of the Shinnecocks." (Southampton Town Archives, Death Records Mss.) This biological inaccuracy, with its false ring of finality, implied that the culture was also dying. The local press seized upon this theme with great enthusiasm. Presumably the newspaper reporters were merely trying to add a bit of drama to their story which might attract more readers. This sort of comment was repeated with greater frequency after the tragic sinking of the Circassian in December, 1876. The ship ran aground offshore during a storm. When the call went out for a salvage crew to rescue the cargo, eleven men from Shinnecock agreed to take the job. One of the men, Alfonso Eleazer, left the ship before the storm engulfed the rescue operation. The ship broke apart while the crew was on board, casting all of them into the freezing water. None of the Shinnecock men were saved. Reporters were quick to lament the passing of the "flower of the Shinnecock tribe.'' As recently as April 22' 1936, the Long Island Press repeated the story of the Circassian and concluded with the assertion that "They were the last of the pure blood male Indians on Long Island."

There were two false premises implicit in this epitaph. One was that the death of ten men depleted the Shinnecock male population "beyond recovery." We do not have the actual census figures of 1876 but, judging from censuses before and after that date, there were over two hundred Shinnecock living on or near the reservation. The second false premise is that these ten were the "purest" of the Shinnecock population. Certainly the people who recruited the salvage crew did not take the time to select "racially pure" Shinnecock. They were simply a random number of men who needed work at the time. In spite of these inaccuracies, the myth of the last "pure-blood" was recited again and again in the media.

In 1909 an Albany newspaper carried the report of a state health officer who had investigated a tuberculosis epidemic on eastern Long Island. The doctor was so struck by the appearance of a Shinnecock man named Wickham Cuffee that he sent a photograph back in his report. Mr. Cuffee so closely resembled George Washington, said Dr. Huber, that the local people often called him "George." The Brooklyn Eagle picked up the Albany story and summarized it in their September 4, 1909 edition. The article concluded with the following words: We were not aware before that there was a "pureblooded' or .'full-blooded" Indian on the reservation. The last of the full-bloods was lost on the wrecked steamer, Circassian.

Sure enough, when Wickham Cuffee died in 1915 he was anointed "the last of the Shinnecocks" by local historian John Morice (Morice, 1979: 164). In 1936 when Mary Rebecca Kellis died at the age of 102, she was duly heralded as " . . . the last full blooded Indian living on Long Island." (Long Island Press, April 22, 1936). Many more citations of this sort can easily be found. The same old phrases were printed whenever an elderly person from the reservation died.

In spite of wishful thinking on the part of people who would like to see the Shinnecock disappear, the Indians and their culture are alive and well today. Historical documentation and anthropological data clearly support this conclusion. The best way to demonstrate this is to carefully examine the ancient traditions as they evolved so that we can trace their connection to current customs and practices among the Shinnecock.

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The Montauk Indians
The Native Presence: Contact Period, 1520-1640

The first known European visitor of the Montauk was probably Adrian Block, who coasted around the point in 1619, naming it Visscher's Hoek (for the extensive fishing going on) and mapping Block Island.

"The people excel us in size: they are of bronze color. some inclining more to whiteness. others to tawny color: the face sharply cut. the hair long and black. upon which they bestow the greatest study in adorning it: the eyes black and alert. the bearing kind and gentle." Thus Giovanni Verrazano described the Native people he discovered in New York and Newport harbors in 1524.

John Scott's map of the Island drawn in 1655 and published in 1680 showed the village of Easthampton, the point as Wampanog, and Myantoket as the peninsula, as well as the new Native fort - the only map to do so. By the beginning of the 1700s Southack's map of Long Island lists E. Hampton, Montock Point, Napage Sandy Beach, and Indian Town on the Napeage part of the peninsula. A British navigation map of the 1770s depicts the Indian Plantation in the middle of the peninsula on the east side of Fort Pond Bay, named after the Native fort there.

Maps of the 1800s show Indian Fields to the east of Great Pond. The maps record the pushing of the Montauk further eastward with each 'land purchase' (usually coerced) into a "reservation" at the tip of the point. Maps after 1880 list only the Montauk Development Company on the former Native land, reflecting the final dispersal of the Montauk off their ancestral land to enclaves in Freetown (north of East Hampton), Eastville (eastern Sag Harbor), the Shinnecock Reservation, and other areas of Long Island and the nation.

From both the documentary and map record, it is clear the first European explorers entered an inhabited area and that the subsequent colonists invaded another people's land. This was accomplished peacefully because epidemics of European diseases brought by earlier fishermen and explorers like Verrazano had decimated the Native population to about 1/10th its former size before colonization. The English justified their settlement through Queen Elizabeth's edict that any non-Christian land could be taken. The Dutch purchased land from the Natives to better secure the title, and the English followed suit.

The Natives did not understand that they were "selling" the land forever, as they had no concept of individual ownership - the bounties of Nature were for all to share. They retained the right to fish, hunt, fowl, and gather basket and wigwam materials in many deeds, which soon was taken from them as the colonists fenced the land. They thought the goods given to them by the Europeans were gifts for the use of the resources, a custom of their society.

Restriction of their food sources, the resultant malnutrition, worsened by liquor they were plied with by the settlers, plus the recurring epidemics of European diseases, further depleted the Montauk as well as all Native groups.

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The Metoac

The Metoac had the misfortune to occupy Long Island which was regarded as the source of the best wampum in the Northeast. Each summer from the waters of Long Island Sound the Metoac harvested clam shells which, during the winter, were painstakingly fashioned into small beads they called "wampompeag" - shortened later by the English into the more familiar form "wampum." To the Dutch traders, it was siwan (sewan). The Metoac traded this to other tribes (most notably the Mahican) and prospered as a result.

Population

The population of all of the Metoac tribes in 1600 was probably somewhere around 10,000, but the combined effects of warfare and epidemic during the next 60 years were devastating. By 1659 less than 500 Metoac remained on Long Island. By 1788 their number had fallen to 162, and the 1910 census listed 167 Shinnecock, 29 Montauk, and one Poosepatuck. Currently, there are two reservations on Long Island: the Shinnecock with nearly 400 residents; and the 200 Unkechaug at the Poospatock Reserve. Besides those on the reservations, there are more than 1,400 Metoac living in the immediate area. Although the State of New York attempted to close the reservations during the 1930s, state recognition of the Shinnecock and Unkechaug dates from the colonial period. However, since they have not signed treaties with the United States, neither tribe is federally recognized.

Names

Spread across an island more than 120 miles in length, the Metoac apparently did not have a collective name for themselves. Jameco has been used upon occasion, as well as Manhattan meaning "island people." Other tribes sometimes referred to them as Sewanakie meaning "salt water people," but in most cases this was an Algonquin name for Europeans, especially the Dutch. The Metoac are frequently called the Montauk, the name of the largest tribe.

Sub-Nations

Canarsee, Corchaug (Cochaug), Manhasset (Manhansick), Manhattan, Massapequa (Marsapequa, Maspeth), Matinecock (Matinecoc), Merrick (Meroke, Merikoke, Meracock), Montauk (Meanticut), Nesaquake (Missaquogue), Patchogue (Onechechaug, Patchoag), Rockaway (Rechaweygh, Rechquaakie), Secatoag (Secatogue), Setauket (Seatalcat), Shinnecock, and Unkechaug (Unchachaug, Unquaches, Unquachog, Unquachock, Unchechauge).

Culture

Metoac is a geographic, rather than political, grouping of the tribes of Long Island, and for no other reason than Manhattan was also an island, they will include the tribe of that name. For linguistic reasons, the tribes on Staten Island are considered Unami Delaware. Since all of the Long Island tribes were culturally similar, not only to each other, but to other tribes just to the north on the southern coast of New England, and there is no general consensus on their classification. The Metoac were an agricultural people who supplemented their diet with fishing and hunting. Although they lived in villages, there was regular seasonal movement in a fixed pattern to take advantage of the resources. Villages were generally small and rarely fortified until they were living under constant threat after 1630. Although they sometimes joined in loose confederations, their lack of a strong central authority before contact was a clear indication there was little intertribal conflict. By far, the most distinctive characteristic of the Metoac was their important role in native trade.

It was the Metoac's grave misfortune to occupy the northern shore of Long Island which was the source of the best wampum in the Northeast. Each summer, the Metoac harvested clam shells from the waters of Long Island Sound which, during the winter, were painstakingly fashioned into small beads. Strung together in long strands, they were called "wampompeag" - shortened somewhat by the English colonists into the more familiar form of "wampum" ...the Dutch called it siwan (sewan). The Metoac traded this painstakingly crafted product to other tribes (most notably the Mahican) and prospered as a result. Passed from tribe to tribe, Long Island wampum made its way as far west as the Black Hills of South Dakota. The strings of shell beads were sometimes employed as a rudimentary currency in native trade, but it was also valued for personal decoration. Arranged into belts whose designs could convey ideas, wampum was also employed in native diplomacy to bind important agreements such as war and peace.

It came in two varieties: white and dark (which varied from purple to black). In general, the dark beads had a value roughly twice that of white. The shells from which wampum was made were found on both sides of Long Island Sound, so the Metoac never had a monopoly. Other tribes (Delaware, Mattabesic, Niantic, Pequot, and Narragansett) were also involved in its manufacture, but the wampum created by the Metoac on the northern shore of Long Island was considered the best. After 1600, the European fur trade distorted the original purposes and value of wampum. Strung together and measured in fathoms, it became a medium of exchange in trade between white and native which greatly increased its value. A peaceful people cursed with a valuable resource, the Metoac proved easy prey for more powerful and aggressive tribes.

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