by Melissa Horner-Petrone, PhD Candidate, University of Missouri. Written in consultation with and support from the ASA Sociology of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations Section’s Leadership Council.
The American Sociological Association 2026 Annual Meeting, “Disrupting the Status Quo,” will take place on Lenapehoking (le-NAH-pay-ha-king), the homelands of Lenape Peoples (le-NAH-pay). More specifically, sociologists will meet in Manahatta—roughly translated from the Lenape’s Algonquian language as “island of many hills” and “place where we get bows” (made from the plentiful hickory trees in the area).
During downtime from the meeting, one might stroll along Shatemuc, “the river that flows both ways” (Hudson River); check out Wall Street, which was the location of an actual wall Dutch settlers built in the 1600s to keep the Lenape out of the area; or take in a show on Broadway, a 33-mile road that spans the length of New York City and was built on top of the path Lenape Peoples had established as a trade route that extended from what’s now Battery Park northward to Boston.
In this essay, the leadership council of ASA’s Sociology of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations (IPNN) Section draws attention to the Indigenous Peoples, lands, and waters that have comprised the area known as “New York City” since time immemorial. Further, we offer this essay as a way to counter the systemic presence of ongoing settler colonialism and ubiquitous Indigenous erasure within U.S. sociology. (For example, see Davis-Delano and Fryberg’s 2025 essay in Contexts magazine, as well as the Contexts editorial team’s apology letter).
Coincidentally, as sociologists gather in Manahatta for the annual meeting, 2026 is also the 400-year anniversary of the settler colonial “founding” of New York City. In 1626, the Lenape “sold” Manahatta to Dutch settlers—for which no deed has ever been found, despite the Dutch keeping otherwise meticulous records. Though the director of Dutch settlement believed this agreement to be a transaction that meant Dutch ownership over Manahatta, the Lenape’s perspective was that this agreement meant that they would be sharing the land alongside the Dutch moving forward. This difference in worldview and the breakdown in relationality are part of the entanglements of settler colonialism and Indigeneity many of us inherit today.
Even as settler colonialism in the New York City area has wreaked havoc on the land and water and displaced Native Peoples for more than 400 years, five current Lenape Nations remain (three in the U.S., and two in Canada): Delaware Tribe of Indians; Delaware Nation; Stockbridge-Munsee Community; Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit; and Munsee-Delaware Nation. Further, New York City has long been a place where Indigenous Peoples from all over the globe call home—including families from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Pacific Islands—and has been a thriving place for urban Native populations for decades. For example, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois) comprised of Six Nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora—have homelands in upstate New York and Canada, and Haudenosaunee ironworkers have come to New York City to build bridges and skyscrapers (e.g., Empire State Building, George Washington Bridge, World Trade Center). In other words, the New York City skyline has been built by Indigenous hands.
Despite these realities, it is commonplace to consider New York City an urban hub, a multicultural melting pot, or the financial capital of the world, rather than Indigenous land. We resist this imposed binary—as if Indigenous Peoples are not urban, or urban land is not Indigenous land—and we want to celebrate the growing contemporary Native presence in the city and invite others to do the same. For example, the Urban Indigenous Collective supports the well-being of urban Indigenous folks, while the Lenape Center focuses on Lenape arts and culture. Buffalo Jump NYC’s goal is to reclaim and re-indigenize New York City foodways by offering Native-centric catering. NYC is also home to Relative Arts, a community space that showcases Indigenous fashion and design and fosters Indigenous futurisms through collaboration and education. You can even pick up your “I ♥️ Lenapehoking” t-shirt here! Finally, New York University’s Center CIRCL (Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands) grows Indigenous research at New York University and beyond, while providing pathways for Lenape diaspora scholars and artists to spend time in their homelands in New York City. To learn more about New York City as an Indigenous place, visit this video of an immersive walking tour of Lower Manhattan with an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe—part of the contextual promotion for the recent play Manahatta (2018) by Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee Nation) that defiantly demonstrates that the Lenape are still in New York City.
As we offer these backgrounds and contemporary realities of Manahatta/New York City as always-having-been an Indigenous place, we encourage ASA and its membership to consider how we might all strive to be in better relation with Indigenous lands and Peoples via our Annual Meetings. In the spirit of countering ongoing settler colonialism and the erasure of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations in sociology, we share questions that we hope to think about alongside all sociologists. We see these questions as relational inroads at the organizational level, the individual level, and every level in between.
- How can ASA move into better active alignment with what its land acknowledgement declares? (For this meeting as well as future meetings.)
- Treaties are living documents. What does it mean for settlers on Lenapehoking, including the ASA, to honor treaties that were made with the Lenape?
- In what ways can ASA be in relationship with and support the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations in the places where annual meetings are held?
- What are the confluences and intersections of the Sociology of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations with migration, sex/gender, labor, disability, global/transnational realities, law, racial/ethnic minorities, knowledge production, methodologies, teaching, and more?
- What are the ways sociologists can more intentionally consider place, lands, and waters in sociological inquiry?
- How might sociologists collectively counter pervasive settler colonial structures in ways that traverse our often-siloed subfields?
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Resources for Further Reading
Ambo, Theresa, and Theresa Rocha Beardall. 2023. “Performance or Progress? The Physical and Rhetorical Removal of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Land Acknowledgments at Land-grab Universities.” American Educational Research Journal 60(1): 103–40.
Bacon, J. M. 2019. “Settler Colonialism as Eco-Social Structure and the Production of Colonial Ecological Violence.” Environmental Sociology 5(1): 59–69.
Davis-Delano, Laurel R., Renee V. Galliher, and Joseph P. Gone. 2024. “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Colder: The Harmful Nature of Invisibility of Contemporary American Indians.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 47(15): 3302–3327.
McKay, Dwanna, Kirsten Vinyeta, and Kari Norgaard. 2020. “Theorizing Race and Settler Colonialism within U.S. Sociology.” Sociology Compass 14(9): 1–17.
Nicholls, Heidi. Forthcoming. “Settler Sociology: Eugenic Responses to Imperial Crises in the 20th Century.” Sociology Lens.
Steinman, Erich W. 2022. “Settler Colonialism and Sociological Knowledge: Insights and Directions Forward. Theory and Society 51 (1): 145-176.