What the Accounts Demonstrate
Why does it matter? Because it’s a challenging test case that vindicates indigenous memory-work over colonial documentary evidence. For the Munsee memorialists, their traditional knowledge is not incidental, as Schoolcraft seemed to think, but significant to their present demands. The memories of the 1805 Treaty of Fort Industry, the 1757 Treaty of Easton, and the early seventeenth-century arrival of the Dutch compose a coherent historical narrative and claim to historical knowledge. It’s important to the Munsees that they were the first to greet the colonists and to give them land. What they’re proposing in 1849 is a long protracted exchange: a tract of valuable Manhattan real-estate for a tract of “vacant” land on the Great Plains.
The Munsees’ 1849 Memorial made a strong case: it demonstrates their understanding of the process and their effective mastery of its forms. In forwarding it to his Superintendent, the Indian Agent Cummins endorsed their request for “a Small country on which they can live and thrive, and claim as their own,” and urged “a speedy and Serious consideration of this Subject”; Schoolcraft added that it “was worthy of favorable consideration.”Yet like so many Native petitions for redress, it did not ultimately succeed in its practical aims. The Munsee community on Delaware lands in Kansas mostly disbanded. Many returned to Wisconsin and Canada; others joined the Delawares in an eventual move to eastern Oklahoma.15 Today, the document serves as a memorial in another sense of the word: a reminder of a particular, transitory phase in the Munsee diaspora, but also of a different way of understanding history, left whole, rather than broken into parcels.