Selling Manhattan

Colonialism refers to the process by which one culture appropriates the land of a different culture, a process that inevitably weakens the customs, cultures, and rituals of the nation being invaded. At the core of Duffy’s poem is the conflict between the Dutch settlers bent on colonizing what to them was an unchartered wilderness there for the taking, and the Indigenous peoples whose culture and civilization had been rooted in centuries of existence amid the natural beauty and resource-rich island of Manahatta (a word that meant “hilly island” in Lenape).

Writing nearly three centuries after the fact, Duffy understands what the Lenape and other Indigenous tribes in Manahatta did not—really, could not. These newly-arrived settlers assumed the land was ownable, transferable, a commodity that could be negotiated. Even worse, the settlers perceived the land as theirs to barter. Only in the last century have writers explored the impact of colonization on the Indigenous peoples. Here the impact is summed up in a single line: “No good will come of this” (Line 15). Two such distinctly-different cultures would never share the land mass that came to be called North America, despite the obvious plenty that would have permitted coexistence. Experts in Indigenous traditions and languages today believe the Lenape leaders negotiating with the Dutch assumed they were merely agreeing to share the land, not give it away, and that they saw the glass baubles as a gesture of friendship.