Esopus-Lenape Land Acknowledgement
The Esopus-Lenape People and Their Ancestral Land
Menla’s 330 acre property is part of the ancestral land of the Esopus-Lenape people. The Esopus people and their ancestors lived in this area for more than 10,000 years, and their descendants continue to have strong cultural ties to it today.
The Esopus, a Lenape people speaking the Munsee dialect of the Algonquin language, settled in small communities near water sources. The Lenape originally resided in the Delaware River Valley before their territory extended into parts of modern-day New York (including the Catskill Mountains and Lower Hudson River Valley), Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Eastern Delaware. The exact population of the Lenape is unknown but estimated to have been around 10,000 people in 1600. They travelled seasonally as they hunted, fished, foraged, and farmed in this area. The Esopus Creek served as a natural corridor for east-west travel, and colonial-era maps suggest that Native American footpaths serving cultural and trade networks between Oneonta, Pepacton, and the Hudson watershed once ran along its shore. Archaeologists have found evidence of burials, rock shelters, villages, and orchards in the Esopus valley. Lenape peoples share a sophisticated belief system in which they acknowledge the energetic power of the natural world and apply this knowledge in their day-to-day lives.
The relationship between the Esopus people and European colonists was fraught with tension during the period of Dutch colonial occupation, culminating in a series of violent conflicts known as the “Esopus Wars,” in what are now Hurley and Kingston in the 1650s and early 1660s. One year after the English seized the colony in 1664, New York Governor Richard Nicolls signed a peace agreement with the Esopus leaders (known as sachems). The treaty laid out guidelines that sought to prevent violence and promote trade. A renewal was signed periodically for many decades after, and the treaty is still reaffirmed annually in Ulster County.
Following the Nicholls Treaty, many Esopus people initially settled elsewhere within the region and became more widely dispersed during periods of forced relocation that lasted into the 19th century. The larger trend of forcible removal of Native American groups from their ancestral homelands occurred through a combination of exploitative legal transactions, violent coercion, and discriminatory government policies. Descendants of the Esopus people now reside throughout North America and are represented in the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians of Wisconsin; the Munsee Delaware of Ontario, Canada; and the Ramapough Lenape Nation of New York and New Jersey.
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