ABSTRACT
The year 2009 marked 400 years of New York’s invention as a city whose emergence is indebted to the unceded territories of the Lenape and Munsee peoples. In this chapter the author maps the repressed history of the theft of territory and the genocide of the Lenape peoples through a site-specific performance on the island where the initial coercive exchange of land ownership was made on Noyten Eylant, or Governors Island. Using performance, the author stages the forgotten threads of the city’s own maritime history as a low-lying colonial Dutch and later British port, linking it to the histories of colonization in Asia and Africa by the Dutch East India Company.
