Uncovering Hudson Valley Indian History

The Hudson Valley may not have the same rich historiographical tradition of New England and the Chesapeake, but it is the setting for a disproportionate number of influential monographs in early American history. Over the past several decades these have included Sung Bok Kim’s Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (1978); Daniel J. Walkowitz’s Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855–84 (1978); Donna Merwick’s Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (1999); Judith Richardson’s Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (2005); and, most recently, John L. Brooke’s celebrated Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (2010). Crucially, all of these books advance broad arguments relevant beyond their geographical confines, which accounts for their appearance on oral exam lists and syllabi created by and for those with no particular interest in the Hudson Valley.

Every subfield, it seems, from political to labor to literary history, has its own classic work that takes the Hudson Valley as its subject. Until very recently, one glaring exception to that rule was American Indian history. Whereas most early Americanists have read enough about, say, the Powhatans and the Iroquois to lecture intelligently about them, far fewer can do so for the Mahican, Munsee, Esopus, and Wappinger Indians of the Hudson Valley. Three valuable books may be changing that: Paul Otto’s The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (2006); Robert Steven Grumet’s The Munsee Indians: A History (2009); and the book under review here. Like the books by Otto and Grumet, Tom Arne Midtrød’s monograph is deeply researched and clearly written. It poses important questions and offers persuasive, non-polemical answers. It does not, however, provide quite enough interpretive payoff to win it a place on many exam lists.

Midtrød bravely tackles a subject for which written sources are scattered and frequently unrevealing: inter-Indian diplomacy. He wants to know how various Indian groups interacted with one another, rather than (or at least in addition to) how they interacted with Europeans. This bucks the trend of most scholarship on Indians, which investigates Indian-European relations for one simple reason: this is what the sources most readily document. Euro-Americans, for the most part, were interested in Indians insofar as they impacted colonial society: were they threatening violence? Could they be used as allies against rival European powers? With a few exceptions, Europeans did not document the inner workings—including diplomatic practices—of Native societies.

Midtrød faces a doubly high hurdle with his chosen topic: Hudson Valley Indians, despite their proximity to important colonial settlements in Manhattan and Albany, often flew under colonists’ radar. They weren’t grouped into a formidable confederacy like the Iroquois, they didn’t occupy prime plantation lands like the Powhatans, and they didn’t show the same receptivity to Christian missionaries as the Wampanoags. In light of this, Midtrød’s ability to analyze inter-Indian diplomacy in the Hudson Valley is an impressive accomplishment.

Midtrød begins by making a strong case for the coherence of the Hudson Valley as a unit of analysis. This is not an obvious position, as the region’s Indians were united neither politically nor linguistically. But they had forged deep connections over generations of inter-group exchanges, materially and diplomatically. The ascent of the Iroquois as a regional power, coupled with the arrival of the Dutch in the early seventeenth century, only strengthened the ties among the Hudson Valley Indians.

Acknowledging that the arrival of the Dutch, and later the English, had a powerful impact on Native society, Midtrød nonetheless insists that “Europeans always remained at the fringes, not at the center, of a complicated and multifaceted Indian world...