Wampum and Manhattan

Furs. Land. Wampum. Money.

Manahatta, a play by Mary Kathryn Nagle, premiered this year at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and I was fortunate enough to see it last night. It intersects with the story that I told in my first book, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter, and with the history of wampum I’m currently working on.

The play tells the story of Janet Snake, a Lenape woman who is an Ivy League graduate in financial math with an MBA from Stanford, who has left behind her family and home in Oklahoma to find her fortune in securities banking in New York City on the eve of the 2008 financial meltdown. Closely paralleling and interspersed with that story is the narrative of Le-le-wa’-you, a Lenape (Munsee language group) woman who lived on Manhattan Island when the Dutch first arrived in the Lenape homeland.

In telling the stories of these two women separated by nearly four centuries, Nagle explores the collision of commerce and community, of individualism and family.

She successfully demonstrates the promise and (mostly) peril of the European and Native American encounter. Although it does not end well for Le-le-wa’-you, her family, and her Munsee community–all the native people of Manhattan are killed or forced from the island (as was historically so, except that many also died from disease)–Nagle makes the point–through the modern-day experience of Janet Snake–that the Lenape are still here, that their struggle continues, and that they (and all Native Americans) have a role to play in their indigenous communities and in the broader American society.

Throughout the play, wampum plays an important role. While the native material culture–including wampum–is poorly represented in the play, it nevertheless captures some essential aspects of wampum and of Lenape cultural values, then and now.

In the first place, Manahatta very effectively captures a sense of the Munsee relationship with the land and its bounty. The play shows the rapid shift that took place in Munsee society as native people, seeking the advantages of material exchange with the Dutch, find the furs and wampum that they so highly valued become commodified. The climax of this transformation comes when the Dutch use brandy, the imposition of their own economic system, and the ambiguities of cross-linguistic communication to purchase Manhattan Island. It is just a short step from there to the demise of many of their people and their dispossession of their thousands-year-old homelands.

Yet wampum remains a constant as the modern-day mother of Janet Snake still possesses a wampum necklace apparently passed down to her from seventeenth-century forebears. It remains a touchstone of her cultural identity and an a crucial material link to the past. The play wraps up with her passing on her wampum string to her daughter, the commercial banker, linking Janet to Le-le-wa’-you not just as residents of Manhattan Island separated by four hundred years, but as Lenape women with a shared culture and a shared struggle of living in two worlds at once.