The Lenape people lived in villages spread along the Delaware, Hudson, and Raritan rivers, across a vast territory they called Lenapehoking, which stretched, roughly, from present-day New York to Philadelphia. They organized into clans traced through the maternal line, their systems of government were local, they relied on consensus and the council of elders, and their trade routes ran along the rivers. For a Lenape, wearing beaver fur was nothing unusual, since their forests were full of them, but in seventeenth-century Europe those same pelts were the raw material for the most prized felt hats of the day. That European fashion, thousands of kilometers away, was about to put their forests in its sights.
Official letter written by merchant Pieter Schaghen.
The Bargain of the Century
In 1609, a Dutch expedition searching in vain for a route to Asia arrived in their lands. For years, European traders came back again and again to trade with the Lenape, furs in exchange for pots, axes, knives, and cloth. Goods that were worth very little in Europe, for furs that were worth a fortune there. It didn’t take long before they decided to stay.
By 1626, the man running the foreign colony was Peter Minuit, and it was he who offered the Lenape a deal, the whole island in exchange for goods valued at 60 Dutch guilders, which some historians much later translated into 24 dollars. The transaction was recorded in a plain letter that the trader Pieter Schaghen sent to his superiors in Amsterdam, tucked between news about the wheat and barley harvests and the inventory of the latest cargo. “We have bought the island of Manhattan from the savages for a value of 60 guilders,” the letter reads.
What the letter does not explain is that the Lenape and the Dutch shared no language. They did not even share the concept of property. For the Lenape, land was held collectively, not individually, a common place to live, to fish, to bury the dead. What they understood as an agreement for shared use, the Dutch recorded as a final sale.
By 1638, a new governor named Willem Kieft arrived in New Amsterdam with another proposal. He demanded that the Lenape pay tribute in exchange for protection. Protection against attacks that he himself could unleash if they refused to pay. The Lenape refused. And so began what history calls Kieft’s War, though “war” is a gentle word for what happened. Kieft launched punitive expeditions. He offered bounties for every Indigenous head turned in. And he kept escalating, methodically, until there was no turning back.
The Night of Pavonia
It happened in the early morning of February 25, 1643. One hundred and twenty-nine Dutch soldiers crossed the Hudson River and fell upon the Lenape camps at Pavonia. There slept the displaced families who had come looking for refuge.
What they lived through that night was described in the diary of David Pietersz de Vries, a Dutch colonist who watched the events with horror. He wrote that infants were torn from their mothers’ arms, that some victims were thrown into the river, and when their parents tried to save them, the soldiers kept them from reaching the bank and let both parents and children drown. From the walls of the fort he heard the screams. Around 120 people died that night. Another 30 were massacred at the same time at the southern tip of Manhattan. The next day, Kieft congratulated his troops.
Although several Lenape clans and other North American nations joined forces and attacked Dutch settlements, burning farms and trading posts, their disadvantage was insurmountable. The Dutch had firearms, fortifications, and a steady flow of supplies from Europe.
The Wall
After the war, the colonists raised a wooden palisade across the northern edge of the New Amsterdam settlement. The wall’s purpose was to mark the colony’s border and protect it from possible attacks, in an era of constant conflict with Indigenous peoples and rivalries among European empires. The 700-meter barrier appears on maps from the 1660s. The street that ran alongside it was known to the Dutch as “de Waal Straat.” Over time, the name turned into Wall Street. One of the most powerful symbols of modern capitalism was born as an anti-Indigenous wall.
While the Dutch and the English fought over the territory, the Lenape lost more and more ground until they abandoned the lands they had inhabited for millennia. The Lenape route known as the Wickquasgeck Trail became first Breede Weg, the Dutch “wide road,” and later Broadway.
“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”
Colonial expansion had turned Indigenous territories into cities, streets, and private property. But by the end of the nineteenth century the goal was no longer just to seize the land, it was to transform the people.
In 1879, the federal government founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Its superintendent, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, summed up his mission in a phrase that would become infamous, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” If Indigenous peoples did not disappear physically, they could disappear culturally.
Carlisle became the model for a network of 408 Indian boarding schools that the federal government operated or funded between 1819 and 1969. Thousands of children were separated from their families and sent to schools hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from their communities. On arrival, their hair was cut, they were given English names, and they were forbidden to speak their languages or practice their traditions. English was mandatory. The rules were enforced through physical punishment, isolation, food deprivation, and a strict discipline modeled on military training. Federal officials believed that Indigenous identity had to be erased and replaced with the values, religion, and customs of mainstream American society.
The last schools in the federal system closed in 1969. More than half a century later, in 2022, a report from the United States Department of the Interior confirmed the deaths of more than 500 children at federal Indian boarding schools and identified 53 burial sites associated with these schools. The investigators warned that the real figure could be considerably higher, since many records remain incomplete or have been lost.
Almost Citizens
The Indigenous peoples of the United States were legally recognized as citizens of their own country only in 1924, when Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act. Until then, close to 125,000 of the roughly 300,000 Indigenous people living in the country were still excluded from American citizenship. But citizenship did not guarantee the right to vote. For decades, thousands of Indigenous people were citizens on paper but not at the ballot box. The situation began to change with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Today, according to the 2020 Census, around 9.7 million people in the United States identify as Native American or Alaska Native, close to 3% of the country’s population. Their life expectancy and poverty levels still reflect deep historical inequalities. It is a paradox hard to ignore. The history of the United States is usually told as a story of conquest, expansion, and progress, but it is also the story of peoples who survived all of it. The Indigenous peoples of North America are still here.
