Finding African and Native Peoples in the Archives of New Netherland and Dutch New York.
Beginning as early as 1627, Europeans, Africans, and Native peoples all lived on the lands once called New Netherland. Despite this fact, scholars have only recently started to revisit the archives of New Netherland for traces of African and Native peoples. One significant goal of this new scholarship is to understand African and Native peoples as central to their own stories of negotiation, resilience, and survival under Dutch colonial governance and incursion, not just to fit them into the already established history of Dutch life in the Americas. In this guide, I will explore how innovations in historical scholarship from the last decade can help us revisit colonial primary sources as they relate to African or Native life in New Netherland and Dutch New York. Doing so, I hope, can provide helpful insights for those interested in expanding their knowledge of all of the different peoples who lived in Dutch New York and how their lives were intertwined.
Approaching Dutch colonial written records to look for African and Native stories can be daunting for several reasons. First, because many in these communities were unable to read and write for many reasons, when they appear in the archive it is through words written by Dutch or Anglo-Dutch people, not from their own perspectives. Second, the traces are often minute or confusing. Enslaved people sometimes had their names changed as they were bought and sold by enslavers, or were referred to as simply “a negro or slave man/woman/girl/boy” because their value was not in their individuality. Native naming conventions on the other hand could be fluid. Native people may have had a name they used for trade with Europeans that was different from the name they used in their own community. Often the transliterations of Native people and place names to English or Dutch were variable, making it hard to determine if the same person or place is being referenced in multiple records.
This guide is designed to point interested parties towards recent writing that exemplify the best practices that historians use to make sense of these traces of African and Native life. Here you’ll find scholars piecing together written sources, oral histories, archaeological evidence, among other types of sources to tell these stories. There has been remarkable progress in this field; books and essays that combine rigorous archival research with deep empathy for their subjects, creating methods that can hold space for what we know alongside what can never be known. And there is still much more research to be done. These texts represent the most recent shifts in how historians and related scholars think about race, place, community, and resistance in early Dutch America, and can support more thorough and expansive historical thinking in all of us. Whether you are a scholar, a family genealogist, a community historian, or simply a curious person, this is not an easy undertaking, but is a worthwhile effort to collectively create a more full picture of colonial life.
This exhibit was developed by Pilar Jefferson, PhD candidate at the University of California-Berkeley and 2024 NNI fellow.
