The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley

3. Struggling with the Dutch

61 Chapter 3 Struggling with the Dutch The sachems of nine Hudson Valley peoples had gathered to meet with New Netherland authorities in Fort Amsterdam . The treaty concluded on May 15, 1664, brought a formal end to the second war between the Dutch and the Esopus Indians, and the agreement imposed harsh terms on the Esopus people. But while some scholars have described the end of this conflict as the final act of Native accommodation to European rule in the Hudson Valley, the treaty itself fell short of Native submission to the Dutch. Although the Dutch sought to penalize the Esopus Indians, they did not compel them to accept formal Dutch sovereignty. The treaty was instead drafted as an agreement between equals. Oratam of Hackensack and Mattano of Nayack and Staten Island, the sachems who had done the most to facilitate the negotiations, were to be guarantors of peace, responsible for waging war on whichever side first broke the pact. Although it was unlikely that these sachems would take that step, this article enshrined the principles of equality and mutuality among the signatories. The Esopus Indians were to come to Manhattan to renew the treaty every year,and if they brought presents, the Dutch would do the same in return—a nod to Native notions of reciprocity. Armed resistance might be over, but it was still not clear that the Indians had accepted the Europeans as their superiors.1 Although the Hudson Valley Indians could integrate Native American outsiders in established patterns of intergroup relations without great difficulty, 62 Chapter 3 they found Europeans hard to deal with. Like other Native peoples,the Valley Indians hoped to pressure the Europeans to find their proper place (as the Indians saw it). This was ultimately an impossible task,because the strangers would neither follow local custom nor enter into extensive reciprocal relations with the Natives. Intercultural interaction was therefore fraught with tension. By the time the English captured New Netherland in 1664, the Indians had come to accept the reality of European power. But they also had reason to think that they had scored some points in the struggle to make the newcomers adapt to local modes of behavior and continued to maintain their claims to formal equality with the local Europeans.2 Integrating Strangers The first challenge the Indians faced as contact with the Dutch commenced was simply to make sense of these bizarre strangers. Some Hudson Valley Indians had caught a glimpse of members of Giovanni de Verrazzano’s expedition, which briefly visited NewYork Bay in 1534,but sustained contact only began with Henry Hudson’s visit in 1609. The Indians may initially have ascribed a supernatural origin to the Europeans, but eighteenth-century Indian traditions of how the ancestors had received the newcomers as gods are better understood as post facto explanations for the ultimately disastrous decision to let the Europeans settle in America in the first place. Van der Donck’s claim that the Indians wondered whether Hudson’s crew were devils or men only reflected the widespread use of the word manitou (spirit being) as a metaphor for any extraordinary phenomenon;although the Indians were impressed with European technology, they did not seem awed by Hudson’s crew.3 During the fur trading phase in the years immediately following 1609,the Indians found the returning strangers to be unpredictably aggressive,but they were also a source of valuable goods. The language barrier made communication difficult, but actions spoke loudly enough. In 1611, Dutch traders abducted two young sons of a local sachem (probably to train them as interpreters ), and fighting among commercial rivals sometimes caught Indians in the crossfire. Some of the locals responded to provocation and violence in kind. One of the two sachem’s kidnapped sons, who had been repatriated by 1619, arranged an attack on a Dutch vessel near Manhattan. Others held that the goods the Dutch brought were valuable enough to put up with their rowdiness. The Mahicans found it advantageous to let the Dutch operate the trading post Fort Nassau in their country between 1614 and 1617. As Indian diplomats later reminded Dutch leaders, local people gave food and shelter to early traders. Some Natives were willing to accept permanent StrugglIng wIth the DutCh 63 Dutch settlements in their territories following the beginning of the West India Company’s colonization project in 1624. The Mahicans let the West India Company...