THE REAL NYACK INDIANS
by Win Perry

Evan Pritchard, author of Native Americans spoke at the Nyack Library last month. His subject was The Real Nyack Indians. He was absolutely wonderful. He traced the Nyacks through original contemporary documents and accounts from Coney Island where they were at the time of first contact with European settlers in the early 1600's, through two locations in Brooklyn and eventually thirty miles up the Hudson to Nyack.

The Nyacks spoke Renneiu (re-nay'-oo), a language in the Algonquin family that they shared with tribes east of the Hudson and into western Connecticut as well as in Brooklyn and western Long Island. These Renneiu-speaking tribes are referred to as the Wappingers group after one of their tribes, and developed the great Canarsie culture in Brooklyn and Queens.

Nyack definitely means point of land, and this was appropriate to Coney Island, which was a peninsula at low tide. It does not mean fishing place as some historians have said. Warramaug and similar words with the same root mean fishing place in Renneiu.

Renneiu is the only language in the Algonquin family that contains the R sound. Pritchard has a fascinating hypothesis about how this happened, and the Nyacks are the key to his solution. The Nyacks told the first Dutch who came to Coney Island that Coney or koni means bear. It does not mean bear in any other Algonquin or other North American language. However there are members of the Taino (tah-ee'-no)-speaking Quiscayan tribe in the northern part of the Dominican Republic on the Island of Hispaniola for whom koni does mean bear. And Taino does use R's. Pritchard theorizes that the Quiscayans were whalers who followed migrating whales up the coast of North America and established settlement on Long Island at Coney Island and perhaps elsewhere, bringing their vocabulary, including koni and the R sound, to blend with the local Algonquin to form the Renneiu language. Archaeologists say there was a cultural infusion about the year 1300 bringing Clason points and other innovations. Pritchard believes that this is evidence of the arrival of the Quisquayans.

What a wonderful historical coincidence, that Nyack, where many Haitians and Dominicans have found a home in recent years, takes its name from a tribe whose unique language and culture may have been formed by people from their island some 700 years ago!

I heartily recommend Evan Pritchard as a speaker and resource person. He is a professor at Marist College and lives in Woodstock, NY. He can be contacted at The Center for Algonquin Culture, PO Box 1028, Woodstock, N. Y. 12498, or NYC telephone (212) 714-7151.
His web site is www.algonquinculture.org.

As part of his presentation, he does an excellent job of singing native songs with drum accompaniment. His fee schedule is reasonable. Although he is a Micmac native, except for a native-style pony tail he looks the part of a slightly seedy professor with a threadbare tweed jacket. He is a treasure.

Win Perry, an architect with Colgan, Perry, Lawler, is Upper Nyack's Village Historian and president of The Nyack Historical Society.

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