Wampum Trail
Wampum Trail: Can historical commemoration such as upcoming 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 commercial 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.
Only visiting sites that offer free admission we will begin at the library in the National Museum of the American Indian, moving on to New Amsterdam Plein and Pavilion at Battery Park, continuing onwards to The American Indian Community House, crossing Beaver Street over to Wall Street (the Dutch are credited with inventing the stock market). Afterwards, those who are thirsty can jump on the W train and end with a bout of Dutch courage at the Dutch Kills bar in Long Island City.
