Rockaway Erotic

The Rockaway were a Munsee-speaking Lenape band who lived on the south shore of western Long Island, in what is now Queens and Nassau County, New York, until the late seventeenth century, when land sales, epidemic disease and colonial pressure ended their life as a separate community; survivors joined neighboring Native groups or moved west with other Lenape, whose descendants live today mainly in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario. Their name comes from their main settlement, which the Dutch wrote down as Rechquaakie or Reckouwacky and which is usually read as "sandy place." It fits. Their country was barrier beach, salt marsh and the shallow waters of Jamaica Bay.

That shoreline shaped nearly everything about them. The Rockaway fished, gathered oysters and clams in great quantity, hunted the marshes, and grew corn, beans and squash on better ground inland, toward present-day Hempstead. Like other coastal peoples of Long Island, they worked quahog and whelk shell into wampum, the purple and white beads that served as diplomatic currency across the Northeast and that Dutch and English traders soon learned to exploit. Their language was Munsee, the northern Lenape tongue of the Eastern Algonquian family. It tied them more closely to the Canarsee of Brooklyn and the peoples of the lower Hudson than to the Montaukett and Shinnecock of the island's east end, whose speech belonged with southern New England.

Older histories list the Rockaway among the "thirteen tribes" of Long Island, sometimes bundled together as the Metoac. Both notions are nineteenth-century inventions. What colonists actually met were kin-based villages named for places, linked by marriage and shifting alliance, under sachems who led by persuasion rather than command. The Rockaway enter the written record mostly at moments of crisis. In 1643, during Kieft's War, the Dutch colonist David de Vries traveled to Rechquaakie to negotiate peace and described a settlement of about thirty houses and a few hundred people. Four decades later the ground itself was gone. In 1685 Tackapausha, a sachem who spoke for several western Long Island bands, signed over the Rockaway peninsula to an Englishman, John Palmer, who resold it to Richard Cornell two years later.

What remains is mostly a name. Far Rockaway, Rockaway Beach, East Rockaway and the peninsula itself carry it, said every day by New Yorkers who mostly have no idea it is a Munsee word. The shell heaps that once lined the bay are largely built over. The people did not vanish so much as disperse, and the Lenape nations of today regard western Long Island as part of their ancestral homeland.