Lenape Resources and Curriculum

By The Red Hook WaterStories team

PortSide NewYork acknowledges that we are on land and waterways that are the homeland of the Lenape, a place they call "Lenapehoking." The Lenape were displaced by European settlers and forced to move as a group multiple times to several US states far from here. Lenapehoking encompasses all of NYC and a large part of downstate NYS, all of New Jersey, part of western Connecticut and of eastern Pennsylvania.

RedHookWaterstories takes its name from what the Dutch called the area when they arrived in 1636: Roode Hoek. The name was later anglicized to Red Hook. “Red” referring to the color of the soil, and “Hook” the shape of the peninsula. The land was not empty when the Dutch arrived – the Lenape were living there with their own names, culture and stories.

Various Western sources give us different names for how the Lenape referred to all or part of what is now know as Red Hook. The RedHookWaterStories team does not purport to be experts but humbly pass along what we have found.

The Brooklyn Public Library in their 2019 blog, A (Not So) Brief History of Red Hook, by Michelle Montalbano says that The Lenape called it Sassian.

Wallace W. Tooker, in his 1911 book, The Indian Place-names On Long Island And Islands Adjacent, With Their Probable Significations, speculates that the name might refer to a person. He sites a 1642 record: “Governor Krieft granted to Jan Manje, a piece of land - towards to Sassian’s maize land – long as the said maize land fifty rods, etc.” Tooker says that Saissan’s corn fields were near Merechkatvikingh and not far from the Gowanus.

Merechkatvikingh, based on the scant records of the Dutch West Indian Company, is thought to have been a village in what is now Red Hook, that had a fortified wooden stockade and was surrounded by corn fields fertilized by fish. Again, Governor Keift via Tooker is the source:

“On May 27, 1640 Governor Kieft, the Dutch administrator for the colony of New Netherland, granted his predecessor Frederick Lubbersen a patent to the lands 'near Merechkawikingh about Werpos, reaching in breadth from the kil and valley that comes from the Gowanus... to the Red Hook under the express condition, that the savages shall voluntarily give up the maize land in the aforesaid piece" (Wm. Wallace Tooker, Indian Names of Places in Brooklyn. Francis P. Harper, NY 1901)

Another name connected to the area is Sapohanican or some variation of that word. Edward Manning Ruttenber, in his 1906 book, Footprints of the Red Men. Indian geographical names in the valley of Hudson's river, the valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware: their location and the probable meaning of some of them, writes that:

“Saphorakan, or Saphonakan, [was] given as the name of a tract described as " marsh and canebrake," lying near or on the shore of Gowanus Bay, Brooklyn.

How the Lenape thought of the area, and how much of present-day Red Hook it included is unclear. The word was also used, according to Ruttenber, to refer to an area in what is now known as Greenwich Village.

For more understanding of the Lenape, we defer and refer to the Lenape Center and their recent collaborations with the Brooklyn Public Library in the publication of Lenapehoking: An Anthology and the school curriculum based on that work created with the Teachers College, Columbia University.

The Lenape Center has made their curriculum freely available and we share it here. The Lenape Center can be contacted directly via their website.

PreK-2nd Grade

3rd-5th Grade

6th-8th Grade

9th-12th Grade

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