This spring is the 400th anniversary of the founding of New York — or, to be precise, of the Dutch colony that became New York once the English took it over. It’s a noteworthy milestone. That settlement gave rise to a city unencumbered by old ways and powered by pluralism and capitalism: the first modern city, you might say.
Don’t feel bad, though, if you were unaware of the birthday. Organizers of commemorative events have themselves been in a quandary about how to observe it — a quandary that has become familiar in recent years. Yes, New Netherland, the Dutch colony, and New Amsterdam, the city that became New York, created the conditions for New York’s ascent, and helped shape America as a place of tolerance, multiethnicity and free trade. But the Dutch also established slavery in the region and contributed to the removal of Native peoples from their lands. Where in the past we might have highlighted the positives, now the negative elements of that history seem to overshadow them, which may result, paradoxically, in the loss of a valuable opportunity for reflection.
A question that hung in my mind as I curated an exhibit about the founding at the New-York Historical Society continues to vex me, and not just in terms of that event. Are we allowed to celebrate the past anymore? Do we even want to?
Consider that in two years’ time the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and of the founding of our country, will be upon us. Efforts to commemorate the occasion have been slowed, in part, by controversy and confusion because we can’t agree on what our past means. And that’s because we can’t agree on our identity and purpose as a country.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m utterly convinced that the concerted effort of recent years to look deeply into the wrongs of our ancestors is vital. We are going through a national process of reckoning, a societal self-analysis that, if done right, just might result in a more open and honest culture.
But we’ve also become allergic to nuance and complexity. Some seem to feel that championing the achievements of the past means denying the failures. Others fear that to highlight those failures is to undermine the foundation we stand on.
The answer to this conundrum is really quite simple. You do it all. You do your best. In our exhibit, we highlight the contributions of the Dutch — they brought free trade, pluralism and (relative) tolerance, and in so doing they set the template for New York City. At the same time, we give cleareyed attention to the role the Dutch played in the dispossession of the Native people and the introduction of African slavery.
But we don’t stop there. It would be misleading and damaging to leave the impression that the Indigenous and African people in the story had no agency. They were active crafters of that history. Enslaved Black people worked assiduously to win their freedom. Some achieved it and became landowners in what is today Lower Manhattan.
In our exhibit, we feature a petition in which a free Black couple, Emmanuel Pietersz and Dorothea Angola, ask the governing council to guarantee Angola’s adopted son’s freedom. That wasn’t assured in the Dutch system, but they worked the angles, arguing that Angola had raised the boy “with maternal attention and care without having to ask for public assistance.” They won the case.
Members of the Lenape, as well as the powerful Haudenosaunee Confederacy to the north, meanwhile, were businesspeople who had complex relations with the Europeans in New Amsterdam and early New York: trading furs for manufactured goods, at times making war, and at other times negotiating complex peace treaties.
One of the most powerful and fraught items in our exhibit is the nearly 400-year-old letter, on loan from the Dutch National Archives, in which a Dutch official named Pieter Schagen wrote his bosses informing them of the settlement of Manhattan Island. Among other things, he said that their countrymen had bought the island from the Native people for “the value of 60 guilders.” A 19th-century translator would infamously convert that to $24. The Indigenous people probably saw the arrangement as an agreement to share the land. The Dutch went along with that, but eventually reverted to their narrower understanding of real estate transactions and began to push the Lenape aside.
The Schagen letter cuts both ways. It represents the foundation on which New York would be built. Without it, there would be no Broadway, no Wall Street, no Yankee Stadium or Katz’s Deli. It’s also a prime artifact of colonialism.
Such complexity runs through all our history. To add nuance to the exhibit, I invited a group of Lenape chiefs — descendants of the people who very likely took part in that event — to contribute a statement in reaction to the Schagen letter. In the centuries since that time, the Lenape have been systematically abused as America has prospered. The chiefs chose to address their unnamed forebear: “Ancestor, who could have known that a Dutch colonizer’s written words and 60 guilders would bring 400 years of devastation, disease, war, forced removal, oppression, murder, division, suicide and generational trauma for your Lenape people?”
The chiefs took this occasion to assert their people’s presence as part of America’s 21st-century landscape, and to declare that the injustice the letter represents won’t define them: “We will only allow it to highlight the resilience of our spirits, minds and body. We will not allow our stories to be forgotten or erased from history.”
The chiefs’ statement — complex yet packed with feeling — stands in the exhibit beside the historic letter and the brief text I wrote to contextualize it. Viewers can see the actual artifact upon which so much history has been built, read the accompanying texts and react as they see fit.
That is how we can advance the narrative: integrate previously marginalized voices and find our way forward. Some will continue to argue either that history should be put to the purpose of valorizing past events or that its principal aim should be to expose our ancestors’ misdeeds. We need history to support our foundations. But it can only do that with integrity if it exposes the failings.
Maybe the main thing we have to come to terms with in looking back is the simple fact that people of the past were as complex as we are: flawed, scheming, generous, occasionally capable of greatness. Four centuries ago, an interwoven network of them — Europeans, Africans and Native Americans — began something on the island of Manhattan. Appreciating what they did as fully as we can might help us to understand ourselves better. And that would be a cause for celebration.