Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

East Hampton: An Agreement, Reserved Rights and Settler Control

Four Native leaders and two English colonial governors are named in East Hampton’s 1648 agreement. Its retained fishing, hunting and wampum-shell rights show why a deed cannot be read as the end of Native relationships with land and water. The paper that supported an English town also recorded Native rights that continued within it. Reading the named parties, retained activities and later transfer to settlers together shows how land claims could grow without Native people or their relationships disappearing. A place before it became an English town This landscape lies on Long Island's South Fork, from the Southampton side of present-day Wainscott toward Napeague, west of Montauk's higher ground. Long before an English town was organized here, Native communities governed and used its fields, woods, ponds and shore. The 1648 agreement itself records that presence: it names four Native...