New Netherland and Dutch New York overlapped with the territories of many different Native peoples, all with particular social and political customs who had long pre-colonial histories of diplomacy with one another. Attending to the intricacies of these relationships is challenging in the colonial archive because, as Tom Arne Midtrød puts it, “colonial Europeans were generally ill-informed of inter-Indian matters” (xviii). He goes on to say that “the records they left behind tend to portray [Native] actions as reactions to initiatives undertaken by Europeans, discounting the importance of developments at work among Native groups” (xviii). In his book The Memory of All Ancient Customs (2012), Midtrød’s strategy for interpreting Native actions through European sources is assuming that Native peoples used the same types of political strategies with each other as they did with Europeans. By doing so, he challenges the eurocentric view that assumes that Native people were either confused or intimidated by Europeans and gave them a special social status instead of treating them like equals. To emphasize this, Midtrød points out that Natives of the Hudson Valley used kinship terms for Europeans and exchanged gifts with them the way they would with neighboring tribes. 

Beyond his methodological intervention, Midtrød’s book is helpful to the study of New Netherland and Dutch New York because it features many of the smaller tribal nations of the Hudson Valley that often get lumped together as the “River Indians” in historic sources, and as the Lenape or Munsee today. The terms Lenape and Munsee, while claimed by descendants of these peoples, are references to language and geographic location that have transformed into historic identity markers. His book contains some helpful maps that delineate the specific tribal nations within this language group and their territories within the Hudson Valley, Long Island and Southern Connecticut, and even into the Delaware River Valley, the southern boundary of the Dutch colony. Understanding the particularities of Wappinger, Mahican, Tappans or Hackensack social formations adds necessary local specificity and depth to studies of New Netherland. 

The essay collection Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America does similar work to Midtrød’s book in bringing to the fore smaller localized Native histories during the Dutch period. Edited by Lucianne Lavin, the director emeritus of research and collections at the Institute for American Indian Studies, the collection features essays from historians and archaeologists invested in expanding readers’ understanding of the intersections of Dutch and Indigenous life in the early colonial period. There are two significant interventions that this book makes: First, Lavin reminds readers that there were Dutch settlements in the Connecticut and Housatonic River Valleys as well as the more commonly cited Hudson and Delaware Valleys, providing an expanded east-west geographic consideration for research. Second, many of the scholars in the book emphasize that cultural influences went both ways in the colonial period – that beyond furs to sell, the Dutch adapted the use of other Native cultural products (moccasins, wampum, etc.) and sought their Native neighbors advice on what and how to grow food for themselves. This more equal consideration of the effects that settlers and Natives had on each other is a crucial leveling of the playing field that can help dispel our present bias. Even though we think we know the outcomes of colonization today, those living in the colonial period did not and had to consider all of the ways they could learn from their neighbors in order to survive. Considering the give and take of Native-Dutch interactions can help us slow down and assess the mutual stakes 

Native cultures, like all cultures, are dynamic and can adapt new information and tools without losing their integrity. Another important intervention from recent scholarship is adding nuance to how Native peoples understood territory and mobility. The colonizing logic of the “vanishing Indian” goes that if Native people sell land they forfeit all legal rights to it, and if they no longer have access to ancestral lands then they no longer exist as a coherent people. This logic is extremely harmful to present day Native communities who may not have access to their ancestral lands but have maintained their traditions for centuries despite colonial violence and cultural erasure. By revisiting the importance of territory, not as a cord to be strengthened or cut but as a strategy to benefit the cultural survival of a people, historians can help Native people assert that they belong to cultures of continuity and adaptation like any other, that they are not stuck in the past or linked solely to the land. 

Jon Parmenter and Andrew Lipman use colonial archives to emphasize Native persistence across the ever changing landscape of the colonial era Northeast. Though Parmenter uses the outdated term Iroquois to write about the nations that call themselves the Haudenosaunee, his argument is compelling. He traces a Haundenosaunee ceremony called “the edge of the woods,” also the title of his book, through the historic record. This ceremony was performed by Haundenosaunee leaders when they traveled to give respect to a deceased leader from a neighboring tribe and witness their successor’s assumption of power. Parmenter found 45 different instances of this ceremony recorded by European witnesses and argues that it was a way for Haundenosaunee people to use movement across space to reinforce their social and cultural status and ties, not diminish them. He uses a combination of Haudenosaunee oral histories, archaeological evidence, and European written sources to make his argument. 

Lipman, on the other hand, turns from the land to the water to investigate territory, mobility, and Native cultural agency. He comments that Native dispossession is often linked to colonial settlement on land, but that in actuality knowledge and access to the coastline and its connected waterways was the more important factor in Native resilience. In his book Saltwater Frontier (2015) he writes, “Viewing saltwater as the primary stage of cultural encounters changes our simple narratives of colonization. The sea, unlike territory, could never be won or lost. Entering the Atlantic economy would transform Native societies, but Native societies would likewise alter the history of the larger ocean” (7). Instead of a straightforward narrative of colonial progress and Native recession, there is an ebb and flow to the ways Native people took advantage of Atlantic world trade and travel. This allowed them to hold on to their communities and roots along the coast even as the Dutch and English encroached upon them. 

So far I have featured historical or anthropological works, but the field of Native American studies is equally important in reconsidering Native histories of the Dutch colonial period. Native American studies is an interdisciplinary field borne out of Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Native American studies scholars often combine methods from the social sciences (data collection and analysis, formal interviews) with the humanities (close readings of artworks, texts, and objects/ephemera) to center issues that continue to affect Native American people living today. For example, Samuel W. Rose and Richard A. Rose’s 2015 article “Outside the Rules: Invisible American Indians in New York State,” takes a Native American studies perspective to explore why the many smaller tribal nations, like those that Lipkin, Midtrød, and Lavin write about, are often forgotten in state histories and records. They explain that there is a direct correlation for these nations between lack of source material and scholarship and struggles to achieve state or federal recognition. Of particular note is their profile of Long Island Algonquian peoples (Shinnecock, Unkechaug, and Montaukett, amongst others) who were central to the politics and economy of the Dutch colonial period, but are constantly fighting to maintain their homelands on Long Island today. 

Native American studies is also crucial as a field that takes seriously the effects of colonial violence in all forms on Native people, and the types of reparative work necessary to address these wrongs today. Rose Miron does an exemplary job of this in her article “Fighting for the Tribal Bible: Mohican Politics of Self-Representation in Public History” (2018). Though the name Mohican may call to mind the famous James Fenimore Cooper novel, the Mohican are a living people whose original territory included the Hudson Valley and parts of Western Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Europeans and Americans removed them from their lands seven times, starting in 1734, and they eventually settled in present day Wisconsin. Like Long Island Algonquins, the Mohican were central to the Dutch colonial world. They struggle to share their perspective on this history today because of the ways that they are presented as extinct in popular culture. Miron uses the battle for the repatriation of an early bible gifted to the tribe in 1745 as a case study to explain the importance of self-representation for Native peoples today. Her work reminds us that primary sources are not just important because of their scholarly utility, but because they are material linkages for communities between the past and the present. This is especially poignant for Native communities who have had their material histories – land and belongings – stolen from them. Mohican self-representation is also exemplified in the exhibition People of the Waters that Are Never Still: A Celebration of Mohican Art and Culture a collaboration between the Stockbridge Munsee nation and the Albany Institute on view until the end of 2024.  

Works Cited and Additional Reading

Finley, Chris, and Camilla Townsend. “‘All He Had Told Them . . . Was True’: Native American History and the Witnessing of Abuse in the Archive.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 9, no. 2 (2022): 95–123.

Lavin, Lucianne, ed. Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America: What Archaeology, History, and Indigenous Oral Traditions Teach Us about Their Intercultural Relationships. State University of New York Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.18253463.

Lipman, Andrew. The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast  / Andrew Lipman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

Midtrød, Tom. “Native American Landholding in the Colonial Hudson Valley.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 79–104. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.37.1.243w38p1x351u173.

Midtrød, Tom Arne. The Memory of All Ancient Customs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Miron, Rose. “Fighting for the Tribal Bible: Mohican Politics of Self-Representation in Public History.” Native American and Indigenous Studies 5, no. 2 (2018): 91–122. https://doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.5.2.0091.

Parmenter, Jon. The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/26/monograph/book/6975.

Rose, Samuel W. and Richard A. Rose. “Outside the Rules: Invisible American Indians in New York State.” Wicazo Sa Review 30, no. 2 (2015): 56. https://doi.org/10.5749/wicazosareview.30.2.0056.