The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley

Paul Otto

May 2006 · European Expansion & Global Interaction Book 3 · Berghahn Books

About this ebook

Employing a frontier framework, this book traces intercultural relations in the lower Hudson River valley of early seventeenth-century New Netherland. It explores the interaction between the Dutch and the Munsee Indians and considers how they, and individuals within each group, interacted, focusing in particular on how the changing colonial landscape affected their cultural encounter and Munsee cultural development. At each stage of European colonization - first contact, trade, and settlement - the Munsees faced evolving and changing challenges.

Understanding culture in terms of worldview and societal structures, this volume identifies ways in which Munsee society changed in an effort to adjust to the new intercultural relations and looks at the ways the Munsees maintained aspects of their own culture and resisted any imposition of Dutch societal structures and sovereignty over them. In addition, the book includes a suggestive afterword in which the author applies his frontier framework to Dutch-indigenous relations in the Cape colony.

About the author

Paul Otto is Associate Professor of History at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon where he teaches early American, Latin American, and southern African history. He earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1995 and, as a Fulbright Fellow, undertook research in the Netherlands.