The Wappinger Confederacy: The Eastern Hudson's Erased Nations

The Lenape are the nation most associated with Manhattan, but the eastern bank of the Hudson River from the Bronx north to Poughkeepsie was the territory of the Wappinger Confederacy, a loose alliance of Munsee-speaking bands that included the Wappinger proper, the Kitchawank, the Sintsinck, and the Nochpeem. They were not a single unified nation but a network of related communities, speaking closely related dialects of the Munsee language, occupying a river valley that provided them with fish, shellfish, deer, turkey, corn, and squash in sufficient abundance to support stable villages throughout the year.

European contact brought the same sequence of catastrophes to the Wappinger that it brought to the Lenape: epidemic disease before most communities had seen a European face, reducing populations by estimates ranging from sixty to ninety percent in some locations. Then fraudulent land purchases conducted through interpreters the sellers did not trust and legal frameworks the sellers did not share. Then war. The Peach Tree War of sixteen fifty-five, in which Dutch forces retaliated against Lenape and Wappinger communities after a Dutch farmer killed an Indigenous woman for picking peaches in his orchard, killed an estimated sixty Wappinger people across several settlements on the eastern Hudson. The documentation comes from Dutch colonial records.

Progressive displacement across the seventeenth century pushed the surviving Wappinger communities north and then west. Some joined the Stockbridge-Munsee community that eventually relocated to Wisconsin, where the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation is federally recognized today and maintains a government and language-revitalization program in Bowler, Wisconsin. The Ramapough Lenape Nation in northern New Jersey holds state recognition. The Munsee language, which was spoken from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie for millennia, is now critically endangered. As of two thousand twenty-two, only one elderly native speaker remained.

The Hudson Valley that painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church recorded as an original wilderness, a landscape of primordial American nature, was a managed landscape, shaped by the Wappinger and Lenape for ten thousand years before the first European ship entered the harbor. The wilderness was made by people whose names the landscape no longer carries.