Transcript
[chorus] they say we are not a river
We do not know how many American Indigenous people have been forced from their homeland Lenapehoking. Acts of genocidal violence have replaced the stewards of the land with owners of the land.
[chorus] they say we are not human
Millions of African people have been forced from their homeland across the Atlantic Ocean and into places along rivers like these to be sold. Acts of violence by courts and churches dehumanized people, and like land, became something to own.
Indigenous African cultures on the coasts had a deep relationship with water too. What the rivers brought to them were gifts from the seas. The physical and sacred worlds were not separate but coexisted. The idea of being chained at sea for months was not only a torturous condition but a powerful psychological disturbance to what they understood the sea to be, which was not a place of misery. Throughout the Transatlantic Slave Trade, there are many documented stories of Africans in chains throwing themselves overboard to perish at sea than be in bondage. An act of resistance and a statement of defiance.
[chorus] bodies
In a few steps, you are crossing the edge of nature. Governors Island is a mix of original land and landfill. If you look at a map, the island looks like a microphone. The bottom that looks like a handle is landfill, extending the island’s original boundaries. The original size of the island is the top that looks like the receiving end of the microphone where you speak. For a moment, you can take a glimpse and think about the river coming right to your feet. You will notice that the sound of water will get louder and waves stronger as you move into the river’s original space. If you look toward the island of Manhattan, you can see how the Hudson and East River fork out from the New York Harbor. Both sides of Lower Manhattan have been extended by landfill like this island, pushing into the river’s edges.
The East River is about 16 miles long and flows toward the Long Island Sound. This river has been central to the expansion of New York City as a commercial center. It is this river that held most of the docks that connected shipping to and from the West Indies that supplied sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans during the time of British New York. These flowing waters brought the bodies to be sold on Wall Street and the provisions back to sea toward the West Indies minimizing the need to grow farms, which made those British sugar plantations more lucrative in the 18th century. The agrarian revolution, better known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, is what powered the industrial revolution. When cotton replaces sugar as the main commodity in the 19th century, the United States builds upon the trade routes established from the human trafficking and provision supply chain of the British.
The Hudson River is about 315 miles long and extends through multiple American Indigenous lands. To the Lenape, this river is known as the Muhheakantuck, and along with the Connecticut and West Delaware Rivers, have defined their homeland. The Hudson River was referred to as the North River by the Dutch and defined what was known as New Netherland. The English renamed this river the Hudson after the Dutch navigator who was employed by the East India Company. The Hudson flows north and south, connecting the Adirondack Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. The Hudson Valley gets its name from this river and had plantations that supplied provisions to the West Indies. The Hudson was and is an important point of access to the interior of the country and was an area of contention between the Dutch and English. It was the presence of the English up the Hudson that prompted the Dutch to create the barrier of palisades that is now called Wall Street. As commerce and industrialization grew, so has pollution in the Hudson in the 20th century.
What we call the Colonial era was an assault on human bodies as well as these river bodies. It does not mean nothing was gained from this period but the cost to the earth and humanity is too often overlooked and disassociated from each other. Today there seems to be momentum to save the planet but a refusal to acknowledge the correlation between the climate crisis and the legacy of slavery and genocide. If we can learn from rivers, these matters will seek each other, bond, and naturally flow. It is a lot easier if you know the history of where you are walking but that flow of information is consistently damned.
As the United States of America became wealthy from slavery and cotton, the country expanded further west, taking more land from Indigenous Americans. The Erie Canal, an artificial waterway, was conceived as a means to gain access to this expanding nation. Making it possible to connect the ports of New York to the Great Lakes. This 353 mile long canal was completed in 1825, extending from the Hudson River in upstate New York to Lake Erie. The Erie Canal was central to the growing financial might of the United States, connecting east and west.
If you stop and look at these two bodies of water, the financial story of the United States of America can be seen in one stationary sight. Let’s pause and look at these two rivers. These territories were taken and developed through violence that was passed down and inherited from one colonial power to another. Enslavement was used to create a system of extraction for commodities from sugar to cotton. This fed into the industrial shift that created new forms of capitalism, leveraging banking and markets. From the East River, there was the slave market on Wall Street, and there is no New York without the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, co-founded by the Duke of York. From the Hudson River, we can reach both the plantations up the Hudson Valley and the Erie Canal created in 1825 that powered the US expansion west and made this Harbor a gateway to the world. New York City is a global financial center built on the bodies of water and bodies of people.
[chorus] bodies
Think about what these bodies have seen. Since water seeks water, these bodies of water are communicating to each other. What we do with our bodies impacts their bodies. We are not separate from them. We can make changes and flow away from colonial thinking that wants to own rivers instead of respecting them with honorable conversation.
Think about your body as you move your consciousness along this path. For a moment, close your eyes. Get in touch with your breath and your steps. Even when we are still, our spirit is moving, when we are awake or in dream. Let the river remind you that our bodies, too, move at different speeds – connecting the past to the future.
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