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Us Vs Them Redux...
Reconsidering Columbus Day & The Lenape 'Indians' As 'Indigenous Peoples' Day' Starts To Gain Ground

REGIONAL – "In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue," went an old verse once taught in American schools.

In 1937 President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Columbus Day a national holiday after years of intensive lobbying by Italian American groups, especially the Knights of Columbus.

A Columbus-related holiday had been celebrated before then; in 1892 President Benjamin Harrison had called for national celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the Italian adventurer's journey on behalf of Spain, and his landfall in the Bahamas, and many Catholic communities began holding parades to mark the event. Opposition was also voiced by anti-Catholic protestants, including the Ku Klux Klan.

However, while many started to celebrate the discovery of the "New World" in the 15th century AD, the indigenous peoples of America, from Maine to California, found little to cheer. For them the arrival of Europeans had meant genocide, first from diseases and then from warfare. And accompanying the slaughters had come the loss of homelands and removal, stage by stage, out to reservations in the west.

Shawangunk, Wawarsing, Mamakating, Minisink, Pakanasink, Mohonk, Esopus — here in Ulster, Orange and Sullivan counties we're surrounded by names derived from the language of the Lenape people, often referred to as Lenni-Lenape. They were later given the name "Delaware" Indians, which has been retained... although it holds a bitter irony.

In 1600, on the brink of the arrival of the Dutch to this area, there were perhaps 20,000 Lenape, spread across an area from the Catskill Mountains down to the great Delaware Bay that was known as Lenapehoking. They formed a loose association of clans who could understand each other's language and formed alliances and kinship bonds through intermarriage. Lenape means "the real people," a terminology shared with almost every other group and clan of humans who have always developed a strong Us versus Them (everyone else) style of thinking. Alas for the Lenape, within a century their numbers had been halved, mostly by European-borne diseases like smallpox.

There are many controversies concerning the culture and history of the Lenape, but there is some agreement that they were divided into three "nations" or "grandfather nations" with different animal totems. The southernmost were the turkey totem Unalatchg; in central New Jersey were the Unami, or turtle totem people; and from northern New Jersey to the northern limit of their lands were the Munsee, or wolf totem people. This included all the Lenape in our area, who were primarily members of the Esopus "tribe" and inhabited the land they called "stony" or Minisink, which included the upper parts of the Delaware Valley, the Catskills and the Rondout and Wallkill valleys.

We should note that many of our concepts — including those of clan, tribe, and even family — don't necessarily translate well into the reality of how these people actually lived. We should also note that academic argument over almost every aspect of their history continues.

For example, Evan Pritchard, an author and editor of several books in this area, says that the people in the villages of Wawarsink and Mamakating were Esopus, and that the Esopus ranged throughout Ulster County. They made "wigwams" — semi-permanent houses with a domed roof or oblong structures along a ridge pole. The men were clean shaven, women used red ochre on their cheeks, and both genders tattooed themselves. Warriors shaved their heads except for a stiff, greased "Mohawk" — a style that was actually common to many eastern tribal nations. Leaders or "sachems" wore a single eagle feather in their hair. They were organized in matrilineal kin groups and the women took care of the farming, which was a slash-and-burn style of agriculture, growing crops of maize, squash and beans.

The men hunted deer, and other animals in the forests, and in the summers fished and gathered clams and oysters along the rivers and seashore. Women made clothing for everyone from bear hides, deer hides, and turkey feathers. They sewed with gut and sinew and fashioned tools from bone. They had lived in the region for millennia, shifting from hunting with spears to the bow sometime around 1,000 AD. They were a "stone age" people in the middle of the shift to using copper, which they hammered into beads and even arrowheads, at the time of the European arrivals. They did not have writing, although there are arguments about certain pictographic fragments that have been found.

One illustration of how the Lenape have been used and abused by European "historians" comes with the tale of the "Walam Olum" or "Red Record," said to be a group of myths written in pictographs on birch bark and wooden tablets. First illuminated in print by one Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836, the Walam Olum claimed that the Lenape had crossed the Bering Strait as recently as 3,600 years ago, and moved east and south thereafter. In the 19th century this work was widely accepted in the field of study of pre-Columbian native peoples. In the 20th century it was eventually demolished by ethnographers like David Oestricher, who interviewed elder Lenape who said they'd never heard of the "Red Record" or anything like it. Further confusing the situation are some modern day Lenape who believe that Rafinesque was actually tapping into something real and accept some of his mythology.

While some Lenape place names have become known worldwide — Manhattan, or "hilly island," in particular — the Lenape themselves were to be destroyed by the European settlers.

Colonization began here in Ulster in 1652 with the Fisher/Rutgers Land Deed, which is the first of about 50 Native American land deeds recorded in the Ulster County Clerk's office in Kingston. From first contacts, such as that in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed up the river that bears his name today, the Esopus — like their counterparts up and down the eastern coasts of North America — sought to trade skins, especially beaver pelts, and tobacco for such manufactured items as steel knives and hatchets. They soon became dependent on these items, and equally they soon annihilated the population of beaver in order to obtain them.

Growing numbers of Dutch moving into the region led to conflict up and down the Hudson Valley. For the Esopus, and the Lenape in general, two periods became particularly notable: from 1660 through 1664 the Lenape fought the Dutch, who had established a settlement at what is today Kingston. Marc Fried, author of a number of histories of our area, characterizes the conflict as "the clash of cultures" and describes the arrival of the Europeans as being like "an alien invasion." The Dutch let their cattle roam, and the cattle trampled the Esopus cornfields and ate whatever they liked. The Dutch also introduced the Esopus to distilled spirits, and those poisons quickly ruined many of them.

Alcohol was also a factor in the hostilities that began when a group of Esopus, partying hard on booze supplied by a Dutch farmer for husking his corn, were attacked by a party of Dutch soldiers and settlers. That set off a siege of the settlement by the Esopus. Brief periods of peace followed, interleaved with guerrilla style warfare, with raids and crop burnings on either side. A treaty was eventually imposed by Peter Stuyvesant, director general of New Netherland, in 1664, and after the English took over the following year they began a slightly more enlightened relationship with the Esopus, beginning with an agreement in October of that year.

But peace would not last long and the Lenape would find themselves under relentless pressure as the English came and sought land. Many were forced to move north into Mohawk territory. Others left for Ohio. Later, when the Revolutionary War broke out, the surviving Lenape became divided. Most, perhaps, fought for the Tories on the British side, while some sided with the "Americans." After the war, all natives were largely driven out into the Ohio valley, although Pritchard maintains that at this point some Lenape stayed and became American citizens, and bought back land. Their descendants, with much interbreeding, still live here.

Most of the Lenape, now increasingly fragmented, were driven further west in the early 19th century as Americans, obeying the call of their "manifest destiny," spread through towards and then over the Mississippi River. Some ended up on reservations in Ontario, Canada, under the guidance of Moravian Christian missionaries. Others, like the Munsee-Stockbridge band, are today found on a reservation in Wisconsin, while still more ended up in northeastern Oklahoma, on land purchased from the Cherokee nation for $1 an acre. Along the way they suffered more wars, thefts, and the forced sale of their reservation lands in Kansas. Today they are known as the Delaware Tribe of Indians.

Getting back to that bitter irony of the name, Delaware? It derives from the title of Thomas West, third Baron De La Warr, who died in 1618 and was a fighting man who learned his trade in the English wars on the Irish under Queen Elizabeth. Later he went to Virginia, where he rescued the Jamestown settlement from extinction and then led the English in war on the Powhatan, where he used the same tactics that the Powhatan employed... to terrible effect. His titled name, De La Warr, later became used for the bay, the state and even the Lenape tribal nation as it retreated from the coasts to the hills and then westward to its eventual resting place in Oklahoma.

In a sense, that captures much of the cruelty inflicted on those people, as well as the ambiguity of Columbus' day — now being called "Indigenous Peoples' Day" in some parts of the nation — for one people's victory and another's defeat.



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