Selling Manhattan

“Selling Manhattan” uses as its centering event the 1626 purchase by Dutch settlers, led by general director of the Dutch Trading Company Peter Minuit, of the southern tip of what was then called New Netherlands from representatives of a co-opt of local Indigenous tribes, primarily the Lenape. The negotiation meant nothing to the Indigenous representatives, as they had no legal system that conceived of the land as something ownable, much less transferable.

The swindle began what would become a century of rapacious European invasion and their plotting to steal land from peoples who had lived there for centuries. The Manhattan deal—historic records list only glass beads valued at 60 guilders, or roughly $24.00 (today roughly $33.00) proffered in return for signing over a massive tract of land at the mouth of the Hudson River to develop as a trading outpost to be called New Amsterdam—becomes in the poem a harbinger of the creep of European settlers who would, within a century and later under the guise of Manifest Destiny, justify a land grab that in the end destroyed Indigenous civilizations. “Now get your red ass out of here” (Line 4) crudely but accurately summarizes the historic