What the sale of Manhattan doesn't tell us about Native Americans | T.M. Rives | TEDxGowanus

there are almost no places in New York City that are named after the original New Yorkers you've pretty much just got these and Gowanus so we have the name but the why is very fuzzy nobody knows what go honest means named after a chief you know after some trees and then after the water nobody knows nobody knows yet Native Americans were here for thousands of years before the Europeans showed up and just basically meant an entire world has been paved over now so this talk isn't about that lost culture per se and it isn't about Gowanus specifically it takes the confusion behind the name and uses it as a starting point to explore something that is city wide essentially it's about this now this is a flagpole in the battery and if people know one story about the LA the Lynott Bay Indians it's the one that you see depicted here the leader of the Dutch buys the island of Manhattan for a handful of beads from some half-naked guy so these two are the stars of our foundation myth another ones that are represented more or less on the city seal do you recognize the official seal I love this you because you do even if you don't how about now that's right these two other guys who tell you if there are rats in your restaurant or an acceptable number of rats so you know them and if you've read a book on New York history you may know also that they have names now when they drafted the official seal they came up with an official description of it and if you're a riot or a researcher and you want info on the symbols of New York City this is the book you read and here's a line there to represent the unity between the Native Americans and the colonists Dexter a sailor his arm cetera et cetera description of Dexter and sinister and I an Indian of Manhattan so you got desc Dexter a nice sturdy name for a sturdy chap and sinister this shady satanic name for the Indian now you see this printed in guides and you can see this in Wikipedia and the funny thing is these aren't names some of you probably know this is just Latin for left and right this is the way that you talk about heraldry like this and by the way it's reversed because it's from the perspective of the seal so Dexter a sailor on the right a sailor and on the left and Indian it's just a coincidence of word order that people accept that the Native American has this terrible name what was his name nobody knows how about this what did the Lenape call Europeans now this we do know they call them the Shu anak the salty people ocean voyagers this is the very first description of Lana pay by a European explorer they came towards us very cheerfully making great shouts of admiration showing us where we might come to land most safely with our boat now this cheerfulness and eagerness and and helpfulness is something that you see repeated in a lot of the early descriptions in fact they were a little bit too cheerful for some people the first pastor of New York complained that the Lenape used to come to his services and smoke tobacco and laugh says they are entirely savage and wild he said uncivil and as stupid as garden poles I'm not sure what a garden pole is but I love this idea of Indians laughing in church now settle down savages because if you don't believe in our God you know you will be tortured forever in hell because he loves you so much and I'll stop laughing quit calling me salty so the the preacher went on to add that they are as treacherous as they are tall now think about that for a second the Dutch didn't make a lot of effort to understand the benefit but they were impressed they were on average taller fitter and had better teeth in Europeans and incidentally they didn't believe that they were created by the finger of God to have dominion over the earth but that they grew from the earth just like any plants now imagine how that might influence the way that you feel about nature so we know a little bit more about the guy in the left but let's look again there are a couple of interesting details here look let's look what he's wearing now that's a headdress in fact it's a war bonnet it makes him kind of a cartoon Indian I mean a war bonnet is what you put on a Native American where you don't have any really clear idea of what a Native American looks like but it's a real thing it's a symbol of power and respect and it was worn by a guy like this a Plains Indian a thousand miles away now I don't want to make too much of this fashion mistake I mean I wouldn't go around collecting inappropriate representations of headdresses and New York symbols and statutes because that would be obsessive you know and a little bit sad but I do want to include this just to show you that it goes beyond New York now this is a u.s. penny and what is up with this lady what happened was there was a delegation of Plains Indians to the Capitol and the daughter of the engraver of the US Mint begged the Chiefs to wear one of the war bonnets and finally he said ok and the engraver said that's great and this is the result true story so what about these beads now in this book that we saw earlier the state historian of New York no less says it very clearly the Dutch got Manhattan from the Indians by giving them trinkets valued at 60 guilders or 24 dollars now this is true all we have of this exchange is one letter written in 1626 by colonists in fact it's one sentence from one letter no deed of sale no mention of beads and trinkets it goes like this our people are in good spirit and they live in peace they have purchased the island of Manhattan from the savages for the value of 60 guilders now there's a huge problem talking about guilders or dollars or whatever here because the Lenape didn't really share our notion of money I mean money is just a convention that everybody agrees on and I wanted to know more about this so I asked the the expert at the numismatic Society here in the city and he pulled this out of the vault for me now this is read the real thing it's wampum it's the beads everybody is talking about and he said listen you drill it from clam shell and you polish it and it's hard to make but it's valuable but not money you can use it to trade things and it's wrapped up in symbols but it's not money and the fact is it has its own curious category it's called quasi money and we don't get it because we can't that system is paved over so what about what all of this implies and this is the aspect that titillates the ironists the most it's the shortsightedness of the Indian who gave away his birthright the whole island of Manhattan which is now you know some of those expensive square feet in the galaxy for a handful of junk I mean the knob a guy took because evidently villain ah pay weren't you know this is a bias that's baked into the city if you go into Central Park you can see this wow this is Shakespeare by John Quincy Adams ward and when they unveiled it the presenter said come down to the phrenologist of the present day and they tell you of the visible indications of his invention his sympathy his wit if you know what phrenology is then you understand what he's getting at here with visible indications phrenology was this crackpot theory that your character is echoed in the shapes of your skull it was big business in New York in the 19th century and what we're meant to remark in Shakespeare is the perfect dome of his high genius forehead the higher the better so if Shakespeare is maximum genius it's one of the startling little facts of this city that we have just a few yards away the perfect contrasting example and perfect because everything else is equal it's bronze it's the same scale it's also by John Quincy Adams ward and it's this Indian hunter okay now here things get very revealing this whole idea of high forehead means intelligent now that's we know that that's garbage that's history but it has given us terms that we still use today a lot of real estate in the forehead high brow smartypants the opposite primitive unsophisticated dull lowbrow now where the Lenape doll a warrior could shoot six arrows by the time a Dutchman could reload a musket now you know more than one guy found that out the hard way what would you do with a cat sail well they ate the roots made diapers from the Tufts and rope from the leaves they were maximizers they were engineers they would farm in one place burn another to enrich the soil and live in a third and over the generations they had burned and rejuvenated and Bertie rejuvenated about 90% of Manhattan by the time the Dutch showed up not dull different they believed in a spirit that rode through the forest on a stag and his job was to calm the animals of the terror of being killed for food now imagine the culture that produces that they believe that the Milky Way was a trail to the afterlife and every star was the footprint of a ghost now these things are worth imagining and they don't take a lot of effort to learn about I think so much better than just taking the same tired idea and passing it on to the next guy I mean it's worth considering the name of this neighborhood this rarity and trying to pierce through it even if it's a blurry image at a totally different world it's worth knowing that this is the wrong headdress it's worth knowing that this isn't money and it's worth knowing that nobody can tell you this guy's real name thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 19,634

Keywords: TEDx, Manhattan (City/Town/Village), Gowanus (Neighborhood), Native Americans In The United States (Ethnicity), Indigenous Peoples Of The Americas (Ethnicity), New York City (City/Town/Village), History (Literary School Or Movement), wampum, symbols, currency, United States Of America (Country), Brooklyn (US County), Native American, Seal (Official Symbol Variety), money, Phrenology, quasi money, dutch, settler, Sale of Manhattan, Business, history, culture, education, TEDxGowanus

Id: bQcqKsIfl1A

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2014