Opening from On This Site - Native Long Island

Waubheag (Rockaway Neck)

Waubheag preserves a Rockaway Neck waterway name in Queens. The name belongs to broad place-name and boundary-record context within the Rockaway and Jamaica Bay landscape. Waubheag is recorded by Tooker as a river or creek name on the west side of Rockaway Neck in Queens. Names like this preserve relationships among waterways, travel, settlement, and colonial boundary records in western Long Island. Waubheag belongs beside Rockaway and Canarsie histories because western Long Island communities were connected by bays, creeks, marshes, kinship, diplomacy, and colonial pressure rather than separated into simple map boxes. The 1655 boundary context for Waubheag shows how Native place names entered colonial paperwork. A boundary record can preserve an Indigenous name while also changing how outsiders understood the place. Waubheag places Queens and the Rockaway landscape within Native Long...