Dutch Colonial

At 1646 five scenes were developed based around the Dutch Colonial period in what is now Kinderhook. Once Mohican territory, the first Dutch-commissioned ship passed by there in 1609 carrying Henry Hudson and his crew. Within five years Dutch settlement formally began in “Nieuw Nederland”, initiating processes of attrition on the Mohican and other indigenous cultures of the region, some more violently than others.

The first Dutch settlements in “Kinder-hoeck” supposedly started right around the same time that the building which is now the project space 1646 was built in Den Haag. Most of New Netherland was broken up into “patroonships”, tracts of land granted to wealthy individuals in exchange from peopling it with 50 families within four years. Then the patroon, often still living back in Holland, could run the region however he wanted, making laws and rules as he pleased, often resulting in a feudal-like system. The region directly around Kinderhook was one of the few in New Netherland that wasn’t a patroonship, and so it attracted families of some means who could pay their own way over the Atlantic and “purchase” land from local tribes to begin farms.

New Netherland came to a drastic end in 1664 when England took it by threat of force. Already by then less than half of the population of New Amsterdam was Dutch, the rest being settlers from other European countries. Kinderhook was later officially established as a township in 1788.

50 artists, musicians, singers and otherwise residents of The Hague worked together from mid-March until late May 2018 to create a 15 minute performance which lead a limited audience through different narrative sets and songs telling a summarized story of the Dutch settlement and Mohican displacement within what is today called Kinderhook.