When it involves memorialization, nothing beats a martyr—even when your tradition has performed the martyring. So it has appeared, anyway, in a nation the place no fewer than twenty-six states—together with numerous cities, sports activities groups, summer season camps, and leisure automobiles—bear names meant to evoke these people who got here earlier than. Between 1492 and the American Revolution, this continent’s indigenous populace declined from an estimated ten million to a tenth of that. One of the genocide’s lesser-known results was linguistic. Perhaps 1 / 4 of the earth’s languages within the fifteenth century, linguists say, have been American. Lost to us now are tens of millions of phrases, in 1000’s of tongues, that Natives used to explain the grasslands and gullies and peaks of the lands that they inhabited. And but many settlers have been eager on borrowing these phrases, at the same time as they killed the individuals who coined them. Hundreds of correct names and place-words, or misconstruals thereof, have been positioned on outdated maps and stay on ours.
In New York, the primary such phrase to be adopted by Europeans turned essentially the most well-known one. In the autumn of 1609, some weeks after Henry Hudson angled his ship by means of an inviting narrows, entered an expansive bay, and commenced exploring a broad river that might later be named for him, one in all Hudson’s seamen wrote, in his log, that the river’s wooded east financial institution was recognized to the world’s natives as “Manna-hata.” These individuals, who spoke an Algonquian tongue referred to as Munsee, had beat Hudson there by round a thousand years. Their forebears had left the Eurasian landmass some millennia earlier, striding over the Bering land bridge and step by step traversing the continent to achieve its fecund japanese edge. They’d made their dwelling within the deer-filled woods surrounding a chic pure bay, whose depths teemed with fish and whose shallows breathed, at first of the colonial period, with a billion oysters. In ensuing years, these individuals—together with their southerly cousins, who spoke a associated however distinct Algonquian tongue, referred to as Unami—got here to be generally known as Delawares.
That colonial label got here from the identical English noble—Thomas West of Wherwell, the third Baron De La Warr—whose title the English additionally caught on a giant river and a small colony, by its mouth, that later turned a state. Nowadays, descendants of these “Delawares” confer with themselves by their ancestors’ shared phrase for human being, Lenape. The indisputable fact that we don’t know why, precisely, the Lenape whom Hudson encountered referred to as the river’s japanese shore Manna-hata is expounded to a different reality: their dwelling harbor’s virtues as an anchorage, which Hudson claimed for the Dutch East India Company, have been as plain because the riches available from turning its beavers and foxes into “skins and peltries . . . and other commodities,” as Hudson wrote, to his sponsors in Amsterdam. Within three centuries of Hudson’s arrival, a lot of the Lenape have been both lifeless or dispersed towards reservations in Ontario and Oklahoma, the place their descendants stay.
In the Lenape’s absence, it was left to non-Native philologists to supply theories in regards to the etymology of “Manhattan.” For a lot of the nineteenth century, essentially the most accepted model appeared to be one provided by a scholar named John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, on the 1822 assembly of the American Philosophical Society. Heckewelder, who was faulted by subsequent linguists for associating moderately too many Lenape phrases with consuming alcohol, proposed that Manna-hata was really a misrendering of Manahachtanienk—“island where we all became intoxicated.” A extra sober translation, nonetheless common, was introduced by Heckewelder’s scholarly inheritor, William Wallace Tooker, in 1901: “island of hills.” In latest many years, contemporary analysis by linguists, activists, and the Lenape themselves has yielded additional theories. The most generally credited one comes from Albert Anthony, a fluent Munsee speaker and scholar in Canada, who prompt that Man-a-ha-tonh meant “place where we gather timber for bows and arrows.”
Whether or not these have been the syllables that Hudson’s sailor heard (and different trendy students argue that he might have heard Menating, or “island”), we’ll by no means know. But the land described did certainly have stands of onerous hickory and ash, which have been good for crafting weapons. And, in 1626, because the well-known story would have it, some Dutch merchants, led by Peter Minuit, satisfied the Lenape to half with what would develop into the world’s Most worthy island for pocket change. That story required a Native-sounding place-name to work. “Manhattan” would do, and has.
Minuit’s deal might have struck him as a superb discount. But it wasn’t as advantageous as you’d be led to imagine by tour guides, who usually cite Minuit’s sum—twenty-four {dollars}—with out noting that this quantity comes from a nineteenth-century historian’s tough calculation of what sixty Dutch guilders was value in 1846. And the Lenape who accepted Minuit’s proposal didn’t assume that they have been getting a uncooked deal—and never merely as a result of they could have been a band of Canarsees who didn’t dwell in Manhattan in any respect, and have been thus happy to return to their dwelling village, on the opposite finish of what’s now Brooklyn, with a haul of recent axes and iron pots. In their tradition, property rights have been decided not by deed however by an idea much like what attorneys now name usufruct: the fitting of an individual or occasion to make productive use of one other’s land. Whichever band of Lenape Minuit handled, the association wouldn’t have struck them as everlasting. In reality, Dutch colonial data are filled with references to a continued Lenape presence on the island, whose new “owners” have been induced, for a few years after Minuit’s deal, to furnish additional tribute.
The Lenape step by step grew accustomed to buy agreements, and deft at taking part in consumers off each other so as to achieve a greater worth. Many managed to unload their lands at a time of their liking, earlier than shifting, inland or upriver, to let the white individuals do what they wished. After New Amsterdam turned New York, in 1664, and particularly after the signing of the 1758 Treaty of Easton, which aimed to push all the world’s Indians west of the Alleghenies, holdouts grew uncommon; the Ramapo band of Lenape, whose descendants nonetheless dwell within the New Jersey mountains that share their title—Ramapo means “under the rock”—have been extra exception than rule. Waves of colonists arrived with sheeps, pigs, and the pathogens they’d acquired from dwelling with each. The sheer power of numbers and germs succeeded in pushing all however a number of Lenape (together with the Esopus and Wappingers and Mahicans, tribes within the Hudson Valley) from their ancestral houses. But, earlier than they left, a number of of their phrases got here to grace the outdated colony’s hinterlands, which now embody the bed room communities served by the Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.
Some of these names belonged to sachems who left their mark on colonial deeds (Katonah, Kensico). Others use Munsee phrases whose origins as place-names stay obscure. (Armonk means “place of dogs”; Ho-Ho-Kus might imply “little bottle gourd.”) In the eighteen-nineties, denizens of the Tuxedo Park Club, within the tony city of Tuxedo Park, in Orange County, minimize the tails off their English-style dinner jackets to create the darkish fits nonetheless worn by promgoers immediately. But, centuries earlier, the Munsee phrase ptukwsiituw (or “round foot”) referred to members of their Wolf Clan, who lived within the space. Ossining, in Westchester County, might now recall John Cheever’s fictions or Sing Sing jail; as soon as, it was a Munsee phrase for “stony place.” On Long Island, a number of city names are borrowed from native bands of Lenape (Massapequa, Matinecock) or the Pequot-speaking peoples, farther east (Manhasset, Montaukett). One Algonquian-speaking tribe, the Shinnecock, gained federal recognition in 2010. Now they’ve received their very own piece of the Hamptons, and a everlasting reservation there, to dwell on or monetize as they need.
In the outdated Lenape homeland by the Hudson, close to the marshes-and-malls panorama of what’s now the Meadowlands, not a number of Native place-words have been additionally bands of individuals: Passaic (“river flowing through a valley”); Hackensack (from the Unamie achkincheschakey, or “stream that discharges itself into another on the level ground”); Raritan (“point in a tidal river”). The dwelling zone of the Raritans, within the early sixteen-hundreds, included a big island whose cultural ties joined it extra carefully, then as now, to New Jersey than to New York. Staten Island’s final unbought parcel was offered, in 1670, by a Raritan sachem named Pierwim. The Raritan title for the island—Aquehonga Manacknong, or “place of the bad woods”—didn’t stick. “Raritan” itself fared higher: It nonetheless names New Jersey’s longest river, and in addition the bay that it drains into.
In the Bronx, “Mosholu” was maybe a Munsee time period for a stream that the English dubbed Tibbetts Brook, however whose burbling syllables, that means “smooth stones,” now title a traffic-clogged parkway. To modern-day Brooklynites, Gowanus could also be a polluted canal. But it was as soon as a life-giving stream, whose Munsee title the Dutch adopted. Maspeth calls to thoughts Polish neighbors and warehouses; to its coiners, who by some sixth sense appear to have foreseen the Superfund standing of close by Newtown Creek, the title meant “bad water.” And a spate of Munsee names describe the squishy reed-lands ringing Jamaica Bay: Rockaway (from leekuwahkuy, that means “sandy place”); Hassock (“marshy”); Neponsit (“place between the waters”). Munsee can also be the supply for Canarsie, which, centuries earlier than it turned generally known as the L practice’s Brooklyn terminus, was the location of a Lenape village whose title maybe meant “high grasses.”
There’s an implicit problem in in search of to work backward from written “Indian words,” that are, in actual fact, solely transliterated renderings of Native speech because it struck the ears of white males. This is why even main consultants usually disagree about place-names’ meanings (and why these I’m citing listed here are, in lots of instances, no higher than these consultants’ finest guesses). Early on, a number of locations in New York’s bigger area acquired names whose provenance is obvious. Connecticut, for instance, is a Frenchman’s try at writing down the phrase that the Mohegan individuals used for the broad river flowing from Quebec to the Long Island Sound. (In the Mohegan language, it maybe sounded extra like quinetucket, or “beside the long, tidal river.”) Later, and out west, many place-namers appeared to embrace Indian phrases much less as genuine expressions of place than as shorthand for wild magnificence. Idaho was named, within the eighteen-sixties, by a frontiersman huckster who claimed to talk Shoshone. “Idaho” shouldn’t be a Shoshone phrase; it simply appears like one.
But sound issues to romantics, and particularly to that breed of romantic whose nice love is America. New York’s best-known such determine, Walt Whitman, was an excellent lover of Indian names, and he defined why in “An American Primer.” “I was asking for something savage and luxuriant,” the poet wrote, “and behold here are the aboriginal names . . . They all fit!” He provided the prepared instance: “Mississippi!—the word winds with chutes—it rolls a stream three thousand miles long.” (Whitman didn’t be aware that the phrase “Mississippi River” is redundant: combining the Anishinaabe Algonquian time period for “Great River” and the English generic, it means “Great River River.”) Over the span of Whitman’s life—years that included the pressured elimination of the East’s final tribes, alongside the Trail of Tears—many individuals appeared to agree that Native language paired properly with the panorama. A massively common newspaper column, “Letters from Podunk,” made an Algonquian place-word synonymous with boring, out-of-the-way cities. By then, Americans additionally had a pantheon of chiefs whose braveness in defending their individuals was apparently simpler to admire in defeat. Many of these leaders’ names—Pontiac, Tecumseh, Seattle—turned cities and cities, too.
In America’s greatest metropolis, a push to commemorate the vanquished went as far as to see Congress furnish land, in 1911, for the aim of constructing a National American Indian Memorial. The challenge, which might be located on Staten Island, overlooking the doorway to New York Harbor, was the brainchild of the department-store magnate Rodman Wanamaker, who needed to construct a hundred-and-sixty-five-foot-tall statue of an Indian—taller than the Statue of Liberty—atop a museum.
His plan superior far sufficient that President William Howard Taft travelled to the location, in 1913, to see the organizers break floor. But the First World War, and the invention that Wanamaker didn’t have funds for development, doomed the scheme. This was maybe for the perfect, given the gargantuan cigar-store Indian on the plan’s coronary heart. But it does imply that the town’s solely official monuments to its indigenous individuals, immediately, stay a pair of markers that commemorate not New York’s first residents however their “sale” of Manhattan to the Dutch. One of those stands by the Battery, downtown. It was gifted to the town by the federal government of the Netherlands, in 1926, and features a sculpture of Peter Minuit standing beside what seems to be a caricature of a Sioux courageous in a feathered headdress. The different is a plaque in Inwood Hill Park, by the island’s northern tip, close to caves stated to have as soon as been utilized by the Lenape. The plaque claims that Minuit’s seize of the island occurred there, at “the site of the principal Manhattan Indian village,” moderately than a dozen miles to the south.
These memorials get lots flawed. But what’s most offensive is the way in which that they’re predicated on commemorating what Wanamaker dubbed a “vanishing race”—on putting America’s first individuals wholly within the nation’s previous. This is an insult to all their descendants, who haven’t vanished in any respect, however as a substitute dwell trendy lives shadowed by previous violence. New York City is probably not a spot that most individuals affiliate with Amerindians, nevertheless it consists of extra of them—greater than 100 thousand, as of the final census—than another U.S. metropolis.
Nowadays, their presence is hailed loudly in powwows that deliver Mohawk drummers and Abenaki elders to Inwood Hill Park every June, and to Randall’s Island, within the East River, every October, to sing songs and eat fry bread. But their imprint additionally has to do with the methods through which Native Americans, donning the uniforms of workaday life, have formed immediately’s New York. Many of the town’s skyscrapers have been constructed by the well-known “Mohawks in High Steel,” who, beginning within the nineteen-twenties, travelled right here from reservations upstate, bringing a collective immunity to vertigo that made them the go-to staff on the tallest buildings. Those fearless Mohawks actually created the town. (Later, they might forge an enclave in Gowanus.) The metropolis’s tradition has additionally been formed by figures starting from Maria Tallchief, the Oklahoma-born Osage who turned America’s first prima ballerina, within the nineteen-fifties, to La India, the Bronx-bred queen of Latin radio, whose title hails the indigenous previous of her native Puerto Rico. In latest years, important roles within the metropolis’s financial system have been crammed by arrivals from still-indigenous sectors of the hemisphere: audio system of Aymara and Quechua, from the Andes; of Mixtec and Mayan, from Mexico; of Tzotzil and Okay’iche’, from Guatemala. And no much less key has been the return to visibility—and to Manhattan—of New York’s personal first individuals.
Since 2008, the Lenape Center of Manhattan has maintained an lively workplace, below the aegis of the New York Foundation for the Arts, within the core of what its administrators name Lenapehoking: the Lenape homeland. None of the administrators dwell in New York; the middle’s co-founder, Curtis Zunigha, resides on Delaware tribal land in Oklahoma. But the middle has maintained an lively function within the effort to get native teachers and public companies to append, to their papers and insurance policies, the kind of “land-acknowledgement statements” that their friends have lengthy utilized in Australia. In 2016, the son of a rich artist within the West Village (the a part of Manhattan that the Lenape referred to as Sapokanikan, or “tobacco field”) deeded a four-million-dollar city home to the tribe. (“This building is the trophy from major theft,” he stated. “It disgusts me.”) On Staten Island, a part-Lenape girl named Margaret Boldeagle has gained help from native officers in her quest to see Wanamaker’s monument lastly erected, a century late and in several type, with a extra advanced grasp of how America’s first peoples didn’t die out, in spite of everything. And within the windowless workplace of the Endangered Language Alliance, close to Union Square, the island’s first tongue is stirring again to life.
Karen Hunter, who leads Lenape courses within the workplace, lives on the Delaware Nation reservation in Ontario. There, she’s generally known as the foremost scholar of a language whose final native speaker might die any day. When I attended her class, one pre-pandemic night, she had made a twelve-hour drive, in her minivan, to show. Among her college students was a younger girl in Doc Martens who stated that she needed to “decolonize my mind”; a gray-goateed man devoting his retirement to main the Turkey Clan of Matinecock, in japanese Queens; and Ross Perlin, a linguist who specializes within the Himalaya. Hunter ran by means of some warmup sounds that we’d want to talk Lenape. She requested us to echo her phrases. “Nii noonjiyayi Lenapehoking,” she stated. “I am from the Lenape homeland.” Some of us, repeating after her, sounded higher than others. “Nii noonjiyayi Lenapehoking.” She smiled all the identical.
This essay was drawn from “Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names,” which is out this month from Pantheon.
