The Esopus

The Esopus. . , The people who lived here when Europeans arrived were later called the Esopus, part of the Munsee-speaking Lenape. They were linked by language, kinship, and shared traditions to many culturally related but politically independent Indigenous communities throughout the region. They were sophisticated farmers of the mid-Hudson Valley, focusing on the "three sisters" complex of corn, beans, and squash grown near villages that likely spanned both sides of the river. In the years after the arrival of Dutch traders and colonizers, the Esopus were integral participants in both diplomacy and conflict, navigating the complex terrain of regional Native politics with the upheaval of violent colonization., Escalating tension between the Esopus and Dutch colonizers in the mid-seventeenth century led to violent clashes later referred to as the Esopus Wars. These conflicts arose, not in isolation, but in the turbulence of colonization, a time of shifting alliances, rivalries, and interpersonal relationships between Indigenous nations, clans, and European settler-colonists. By 1663, the colony Director-General Peter Stuyvesant demanded the Esopus give up a large tract of land, including the area now called Kingston. Afterward, some Esopus left to join other Munsee-speaking groups, while others remained, forced over the next century to relinquish most of their land to Europeans to survive., [Sidebar:] , A Buried Past , Archaeological excavations at Senate House recovered broken or unfinished stone tools. The dark grey fragments are made from Onondaga chert, a common material used to make tools found across the state, including in quarries in Ulster County. The brownish-orange fragment, a broken base of a tool, is made from Pennsylvania jasper, a material that would have had to travel north to end up here in Kingston. Native groups in New York were connected by trade routes to groups in what is now Canada and up and down the East Coast., [Captions:] , Munsee and Unami, the languages spoken by Esopus neighbors to the south and west, and both subgroups of the Delaware language. Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, Unami and Munsee speakers were known as the Delaware, the Lenape, or the Lenni Lenape., Throughout the eighteenth century, some Esopus people remained in their homelands, sustaining their relationship to territories "sold" under foreign laws and transformed by the land claims of colonists. Some Esopus settled within the Susquehannock to the west, the Haudenosaunee to the north, or in settlements, of other displaced Native people in towns like Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where they formed communities with the Mohican and other Munsee-speaking peoples. Today, this community is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, located on their reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin. Descendants of the Esopus and other Munsee peoples are also members of Native nations across North America, including Oklahoma, Kansas, and Ontario.