Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Seawanhacky / Sewanhaka

Seawanhacky, also Sewanhaka, is a name for Long Island found in Dutch-period purchase documents. The earliest cited records are three 1636 Indian deeds for meadows at what is now Flatlands, Brooklyn, describing the island as Sewanhacky or Sewanhacking. The name is not found in early eastern Long Island records. Seawanhacky is interpreted as "the sewan country," connecting sewan or seawan with wampum or shell-money, and -hacky or -hacking with land or country. Why Place Names Matter “Place names, as cultural heritage, include significant regional, geographic, and socio-historical information.” — Li Zhang, Sifan Zhou, and Junwei Ren, Spatiotemporal distribution of toponymic cultural heritage of water-related settlement place names in Manas River Basin (2025), Abstract