What Exactly Is Red Hook Village’s Tie to Indigenous Peoples? New Project Will Endeavor to Find Out

Long before cars, buses, and bicycles cruised along Broadway through Red Hook, the vital north-south route was forged into the landscape by the footprints of Indigenous people. 

Among them, the Mohican tribe, a population whose Algonquian name means ‘people of the waters that are never still,’ is derived from tidal changes in the Hudson River, alongside they once lived.

Since 2019, Detroit historian Heather Breugl has worked to weave such threads together, producing cohesive histories of Indigenous life specific to contemporary locations. And in 2025, a new project awaits her: researching and writing the narrative that unfolded hundreds of years ago for Indigenous people in the Village of Red Hook. 

“The indigenous history in the state of New York is so rich that we have the opportunity to be able to tell a really cool story that’s super-regional,” Breugl told The Daily Catch.

At the recommendation of the Village Human Relations Committee, Mayor Karen Smythe and the Board of Trustees brought Breugl on for the project late last year. Her $3,500 contract covers the development of several written works: a brief narrative of Indigenous history to be published on the Village website, copy for a forthcoming historic sign, and a short text to be placed in what officials call a ‘reflection space’ planned for Abrahams Park. 

Referencing the sign and park space, Deputy Mayor Melkorka Kjarval told The Daily Catch that the project aims to make Indigenous history both more clear and more accessible. 

“Both those things would allow people to engage with the history in a way that isn’t so dry as a summary that we put on the website,” Kjarval said. 

As Kjarval sees it, Breugl is a perfect fit for the task ahead. In the past, Breugl served as the Director of Education at the Forge Project, an indigenous arts and culture organization headquartered in Taughkanic, N.Y.. She has also lectured on Indigenous history at several institutions, including Bard College, and curated a series of museum exhibitions, including a Mohican collection dubbed Muh-he-con-ne-ok: The People of the Waters That Are Never Still at the Berkshire Museum. (The Hudson River has received this designation in part because it is a tidal estuary, and its waters south of roughly Albany flow both north and south depending on the strength of the tides emanating at Battery Park in New York City).

“One of my passions is infusing Indigenous history into written narratives that we already have,” Breugl said. “So it’s not reinventing the wheel, not rewriting history, but really talking about it more and giving it a fuller story.”

Breugl is also a citizen of the federally recognized Oneida Nation of Wisconsin with lineal ties to the Stockbridge-Munsee Band. The band began as a group of Mohicans, including those from the Hudson Valley, and members of other Indigenous tribes, who were either removed from their lands or chose to settle in the missionary village of Stockbridge, Mass. 

Breugl, who previously lived in Hudson, is eager to return to the land that her ancestors inhabited. “Doing the work out there gives me a constant excuse to continue to return to the homelands. And I think that’s really cool,” she said. 

With Breugl’s expert help enlisted, Kjarval hopes that the village will gain a decisive version of Red Hook’s indigenous history. “We wanted to get an actual history of the indigenous people in this area,” she said. “Not just in the village, but regionally, so that we can speak to it.”

Kjarval makes an important point: for all the documentation of colonial, revolutionary, and later events in Red Hook, the municipality lacks a decisive account of which indigenous groups inhabited what areas and when. 

“We don’t know a lot about indigenous history [in Red Hook],” Elisabeth Tatum, director of Historic Red Hook, confirmed. “What we know about Indigenous history is based on what’s been published, which isn’t a lot.”

The most extensive research at Red Hook’s disposal, Tatum told The Daily Catch, is a 2009 study entitled Identifying the Native People of the Red Hook, New York, Area in 1609. A passion project penned by then-Tivolian Jeff Golden, the 2009 piece focuses mostly on defining the boundaries of Mohican and Wappinger land to determine which tribe might have lived in Red Hook. 

While Golden’s work, like many others, finds that Mohicans were most likely among the original inhabitants of Red Hook, he admits the possibility of errata. “There is lots of evidence that some or all of Red Hook falls within the Mohican homeland,” Golden, an author, activist, and Fulbright recipient, writes. “[But] none of it is conclusive.”

Another account, Claire O’Neill Carr’s A Brief History of Red Hook, agrees that Mohicans were present at the time of Henry Hudson’s arrival in 1609, but further posits that members of the Delaware tribe also lived in Red Hook. 

The reason for conflicting arguments and historical uncertainties, Golden supposed in an interview, is that “so much of [Indigenous] history has been forgotten and hidden away.”

While this may be true on a hyper-local level, reliable history of indigenous peoples in the Hudson Valley does exist at the county and regional levels, as well in tribal tellings of the same events. Information about Mohican lifestyles, as well as the lifestyles of other tribes, is also readily available. 

“For the average person living in Red Hook… I’m gonna say that 99% of the things that that kind of person would want to know are actually available,” Golden told The Daily Catch. The exact native history of a 1.1-square-mile zone, such as the Village of Red Hook, may be more difficult to ascertain. 

Threads of a story about native people in Red Hook crop up between various accounts. Several posit that the Roeliff Jansen Kill, which begins in Austerlitz, N.Y., may have served as a general border between the Wappinger and Mohican tribes. Archaeologists have confirmed that Magdalene Island in Tivoli was once home to indigenous peoples. And contemporary landmarks, like the Sawkill in Red Hook, were significant to native peoples long before settlers arrived.

Though by no means an exhaustive list, this selection of facts exemplifies the information Breugl may sample when writing the lives of Red Hook’s Indigenous people into the annals of local history. Still missing, or perhaps simply hidden from view, is a decision on which tribe or tribes lived in Red Hook; how those tribes ceded, or were removed from, their lands; and the details of indigenous land agreements. 

“There’s just so much we don’t know,” lamented B.J. Lillis, a colonial historian who recently completed his Ph.D. studies at Princeton University. In his work, Lillis focuses on Hudson Valley land: how it was used, who occupied it, and how it may have changed hands. 

He noted that due to settlers’ limited construction of authority over Indigenous peoples in early Poughkeepsie, records including native people are few and far between. 

“Court records in Poughkeepsie contain very, very few native people,” Lillis told The Daily Catch. “The courthouse in Poughkeepsie didn’t really see [itself] as having an authority over native communities in the Hudson Valley, and so you just don’t always have those records.”

For her part, Breugl is looking forward to reviewing the records that are available and considers hands-on research a favorite part of her job. While she typically works at the national or state level, Breugl welcomes the challenge posed by the hyper-specific nature of the Red Hook project. “[This project] is more particularly about a certain part of the land,” Breugl said. “So I think that’s really interesting, and I think that’s going to be really exciting and fun to dive into.”

Now 16 years removed from his own effort to tell a story of Red Hook’s indigeneity, Golden was elated to hear about Breugl’s undertaking and equally glad that municipal leaders are backing her. 

Remembering his own attempt to pitch a land acknowledgment project to the Red Hook Town Board in the early aughts, Golden recounted one biting comment from an audience member:  “If we acknowledge that this is their homeland, are they going to want it back?”

Since that day, Golden happily observed, Red Hook has come a long way. “I hope that people really have the delight and the courage to follow all of these threads where they lead,” he said. 

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