Manhattan from the Lenape for a price of sixty guilders’ worth of goods, equivalent today to about a thousand dollars. Damaras held up a copy of the earliest known reference to the purchase, a letter from 1626 reporting the news to the Dutch government. The original contract did not survive, but it may have meant something quite different to the Lenape than it did to the Dutch. “You see, this idea or this concept of owning land or resources—that was a European concept. Owning land to the Native Americans was like owning water or the moon or the stars, and in fact, there wasn’t a word for
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