Document Type

Article

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1353/eam.2015.0020

Journal Title

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Publication Date

Summer 2015

Abstract

This essay uses treaty records, council minutes, personal correspondence, and travel narratives to argue that Hudson Valley Indians seized on the 1664 English conquest of New Netherland to try to position Natives and newcomers as independent members of an extended community sharing a common past and landscape. Formulating a history emphasizing peace, preserving the memory of that past through ritual actions, and involving English colonists in processes that rested on that history, Native Americans sought to integrate the newcomers into their existing network of social relations and a physical landscape that manifested those relations. Meanwhile, English colonists seeking to secure the colony and confirm individual land titles participated in rituals, agreed to treaties, and recorded land purchases in ways that acknowledged Indians’ memories regarding lands and the communities that inhabited them. Though the project ultimately failed, the English conquest of New Netherland briefly introduced the possibility of integrating the newcomers into a larger community of diverse, autonomous peoples connected by a common history embedded in the Hudson Valley’s regional landscape.

Comments

This journal is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Its website is available at: https://eas.pennpress.org.

Publisher Statement

Copyright 2015 - The McNeil Center for Early American Studies. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.

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