HARMATTAN THEATER: DUTCH COLONIAL PAST

The month long celebration of Dutch Colonial New York has been a mixed bag for some Manhattanites. The historic implications of Dutch colonial incursions include the violent and terrible acts the Dutch inflicted on Lenape peoples as well as on their neighboring tribes. The journals of Robert Juet, Henry Hudson's First Mate, is most revealing. His expressive daily updates on the "savages" and the particularly violent exchanges that ensued between Hudson's men and the indigenous peoples, suggests that the encounter was nothing less than bloody, tense, nerve wracking, and filled with racist stereotypes of who these native people might be. There fore, the month long celebration of the Dutch presence without its more explicit accountability about entire histories that were altered and complete populations that were decimated, makes the whole occasion of celebrating the Dutch presence for a whole month somewhat confusing for anti-colonial sentiments. Harmattan Theater's Mannahatta Yatra explores this ambivalence of celebrating the discovery of Mannahatta while also acknowledging the violence and brutality that the encounter between the Dutch and the Lenape peoples entailed.