First Manhattans: A History of the Indians of Greater New York

As the story goes, canny Dutch traders purchased Manhattan for a pittance and established a world commercial capital. For the Munsee Indians, however, the 1624 transaction was merely the first of a long string of bad deals that ceded ancestral lands, resources, and eventually most of the cultural life of indigenous peoples in the greater New York area. Grumet, an anthropologist, meticulously reconstructs the creeping progress of European settlement, offering a definitive account of how the Munsees endured "affronts and abuses and held on to what they could." It's an admirable historical reconstruction, but rarely a lively one. Most of the narrative is based on colonial records that give little sense of the cultures that were in such fundamental conflict. While "nakedly manipulative deed deals done at the time were cynically dipped in drink and deceit," little context is conveyed in the author's prose. The 150 years of displacement and disfranchisement has a less dramatic historical context than other episodes in the history of European settlement of North America, but the Munsees met their fate early, and this account revives a vital part of New York history that would otherwise be consigned to obscurity. (June)