Beaver, Wampum, Hoes at Conflux festival….

On September 20, 2009 at 15:00 I will be doing a walking tour called Wampum Trail of lower Manhattan, starting at the National Museum of the American Indian library. Please join me if you can, rain or shine.

the supposed price paid for the purchase of Manhattan

Wampum Trail: Can historical commemoration such as recent Dutch 400-year events be subverted toward a more radical relationship to historical research and cultural practices as a way to undermine and resist dominance in the present?

If you take the New Amsterdam Trail tour you are asked to listen, walk and follow but also to lunch, shop and experience the dynamism and renewal of downtown today. This walking tour asks instead to pause, look and reflect while rethinking the former Dutch colonization of NYC.

This peripatetic tour in a way exercises psychogeography by walking backwards, so to speak, through time but also looks at present day NYC in regard to its colonial history that hasn’t been written down in the history books. Rather it combines facts with anecdotes and oral history passed down by generations of Native Americans living in NYC today along with reinscriptive historic perspectives.

We will begin at the library in the National Museum of the American Indian, moving on to The Netherlands Monument at Battery Park, passing by The American Indian Community House, then crossing to Beaver Street. We will make stops along Pearl Street, the former water’s edge of Manhattan, and continue via Wall Street (the Dutch are credited with inventing the stock market). Broadway takes us along City Hall, over to the Bowery, finally ending at Astor Place, (Kintecoying), a former sacred gathering place. Afterwards, those who are thirsty can jump on the subway and end with a bout of Dutch courage at the Dutch Kills bar in Long Island City.

Map of the Trail

Download the Wampum Trail flyer + map (2.4 Mb, pdf)

Beaver, Wampum, Hoes at 16 Beaver

What: presentation / discussion

Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor

When: Friday Night 1.09.08 @ 7:00 PM

Who: Open To All

This week we’re excited to begin 2009 with an event that takes up the 400th anniversary of Dutch colonialism in what we now know as New York City. This event also arrives, with more specificity, as the long-awaited answer to the origins of the Beaver in Beaver Street. So, we welcome Renée Ridgway and Sal Randolph, two artists/other professional things who have been a part of past discussions and events at Beaver, as well as welcome back David Graeber, to discuss research, concepts, and projects addressing the historical transformation of gift economies into commodity economies, including debt, that made capitalism possible. Finally, it should be made clear that all of this work seeks to address contemporary New York and beyond by thinking through the current financial crisis, debt economies, and alternative systems of value.

Beaver, Wampum, Hoes

On April 4, 1609 Henry Hudson set sail from Amsterdam on a Dutch ship under the auspices of the Dutch East India company in order to find a passage to Asia. Instead he founded a settlement (West Indian Company) for the Dutch on the tip of Manhattan (National Museum of American Indian, near Beaver Street), a trading post exporting beaver pelts back to the old world because it was fashionable to make hats out of them. The company exchanged Europan goods (hoes, kettles, etc.) for wampum with the indigenous population living on Long Island, the Narragansett. They then traded the acquired wampum for beaver pelts with the Mohawk, part of the larger Haudonausaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) or Six Nations.

beaver-wampum-hoes-at-16-beaver