Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Eastern Southampton: English Settlement and Shinnecock Land Rights

English settlers from Lynn and later Southampton trustees claimed Shinnecock land through the 1640 deed and 1703 release. Read those documents alongside disputed boundaries, the thousand-year lease, township-wide gathering rights and the Shinnecock Nation’s continuing homeland. The same records that asserted colonial title preserved Native planting and gathering rights. Connecting them to the living Shinnecock Nation changes this landscape from a story of vanished people into one of dispossession, negotiation, continuing landholding and responsibility. A Native homeland beneath familiar Hamptons names Southampton village, Water Mill, Bridgehampton and the Southampton side of Sag Harbor lie within a landscape whose Native history did not begin with the English town. Shinnecock, Sebonac, Mecox and Niamug appear in the records through which colonists claimed land and Native people continued...