From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600-1830

5. The Ethnographic Past

59 Five The Ethnographic Past Assessing the Documentary and Published Record The Native people living in the Hudson Valley at the time the Dutch arrived either had previous firsthand encounters with Europeans or were well aware of their presence in nearby regions, in particular, the St. Lawrence Valley. To what degree these experiences may have affected the form or complexion of Indian societies at this early date is unknown. In the absence of a written language, their histories were undoubtedly recalled through epic tales, complex cosmologies, or other narratives, none of which were recorded save for Hendrick Aupaumut’s late eighteenth -century account.1 There are no other detailed descriptions volunteered by the Mahicans themselves (or by neighboring Native groups) of their way of life at or following contact. What survives instead are the commentaries, reports, and correspondence of European observers, the substance and quality of which vary considerably. Information sufficient to reconstruct, in any comprehensive manner, an early to mid-seventeenth-century ethnographic portrait of the Mahicans is lacking. Dutch sources from the period —there are few others—that remark upon the Mahican people are notable in their lack of specifics or, it must be said, their indication that there was anything more than a passing interest in these Natives, at least enough to write about.2 Much of this is explained by the focus of the Dutch on the trade in furs, their raison d’être in New Netherland. Moreover, assuming a stance much different from the French in Canada or the English 60 The Ethnographic Past in New England, the Dutch never launched an effort to proselytize the Indians. Such activity, as it did elsewhere, would likely have produced correspondence or reports offering details on the Indians deemed useful to those who would minister among them.3 Prior to the English takeover in 1664, just eleven ordained ministers had, at varying times over the half century of Dutch dominance, assumed posts in New Netherland, five of whom returned to patria after their contracts had expired.4 Being spread as thin as they were, whether serving congregations of their countrymen in New Amsterdam or at Fort Orange (later Beverwijck) and the patroonship of Rensselaerswijck, surely forestalled any substantive interaction of a religious bent with the Indians around them. It is also the case that the Dutch, unlike the English and French, did not establish their colony of New Netherland following the usual imperialistic European design. On the contrary, it was “the laxity of Dutch imperialism” that drove the venture. That is, the Dutch maritime empire “never developed the territorial commitment usually associated with the empires of Holland’s chief rivals for imperial splendor.” Rather than operating, as did other European powers, under the weight of government restrictions , it was the financial potency of private merchants that fueled successes in New Netherland and in other Dutch colonies. Moreover, New Netherland’s path, from trading post to settlement colony, rendered it unique alongside its Dutch contemporaries .5 Equally important, the existence of the colony was not widely perceived as something to fear by Native people living outside of its borders who apparently saw for themselves economic , social, political, and even military advantage to be had. This is not to say that there was no resistance from within, as the bloody and tragic wars waged between the Munsees and the ultimately victorious Dutch in the 1640s and again in the late 1650s into the 1660s attest.6 There is little to suggest that Dutch interests in the Natives extended much beyond their perceived utility as traders in furs or persons from whom land could be The Ethnographic Past 61 purchased, that is, as economic assets, or as potential threats to the colony’s survival. Little else of their way of life seems to have mattered to the Dutch. The depiction of a presumed and, regrettably, routinely accepted ethnographic past for the Mahicans resident in the Hudson Valley in the seventeenth century exists in the form of a small number of relatively recently published works, none of which are entirely reliable. The first of these, published by Ted J. Brasser in 1974, fails to systematically reference or identify the sources from which he supposedly drew his information, which renders much of what he reports about the Mahicans unveri- fiable. Many of the works Brasser does list are dated, anecdotal , or barely ancillary local and academic histories that do...