Talk:Massacre at Corlears Hook

Initial assessment

I have assessed this article as being of Stub class with Low importance. Much of the reason for this lies in the first line where it says "forty Wecquaesgeek of all ages and genders and in the second paragraph where it says "Kieft sought to take advantage of Wappinger who had been driven south ... ". What is a Wecquaesgeek? And who is a Wappinger? Are we talking about some strange animal, vegetable or mineral here? The reader doesn't know because they are not a historian or anthropologist who has read everything about the subject. No, they are looking at this article after it has been sliced and diced as a search result in a Google search. This style and tone of writing is not really encyclopedic as it minimize the true horror of the massacres concerned. Both sentences omit the important word "people". Without this word, the reader is left wondering what the article is talking about, because the real information is somewhere else and not in the article. Wikipedia articles should be written from the point of view that the reader knows nothing. Please remember that we are talking about indigenous people, men, women, children, including infants -some being babes in arms- that were seeking safety, and had camped near a setter fort where they thought they were safe and among friends. Once asleep they were set upon and cruelly murdered, by a band of colonists, in such terrible ways that these events are perhaps worse than even the various genocidal war crimes and crimes against humanity of the 20th century. A good article would explain this clearly. De Vries original account, a translation of which can be found on the Library of Congress website, of what happened at Pavonia is horrific, and the quotation given seems to gloss over De Vries full account of the horror. I thing this is one of those occasions where the primary source of the quotation should be cited instead. Unfortunately, the secondary source of Skinner is from Google books and the text of the article is not directly available online at the URL cited. Also, the same story in an older version of the Lower East Side article suggest the other sources are inconsistent, as only thirty people are reported killed. This appears to be a problem with inconsistent numbers in different sources. To improve the quality of this article, I think we need to have a lot more source material in addition to a single quote from the one reporter who was not even an eye-witness who refers to to this event in a rather off-handed way. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 13:03, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

I assumed it was obvious that these are ethnonyms for groups of Native American people, but indeed this could be more explicit. De Vries indeed goes into more horrific detail in his account of Pavonia than of Corlears Hook, and essentially says that much the same happened at the latter as at the former. This is one of the reasons actually that I was thinking to expand the scope of this article.--Pharos (talk) 16:35, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

When writing Wikipedia articles never assume the reader know anything. The text you write, especially the first paragraph can often be snipped out of the article and use in places you might not expect. Observe what happens of you perform a Google search for massacre at corlears hook. Google finds a suitable piece of text from somewhere on the world wide web and uses that to explain your search. At the moment it is taken from the web page for friendsofcorlears.org/park-history, which provides some background to the massacre, as well as showing what the current day real word site looks like and raises the possibility that someone could visit the massacre site, too. However, also observe that all the wikilinks are stripped off and the ethnonyms are not explained by the wikilinks, so they look a lot more like jargon if you have never seen the terms before. This is why you should write as if the reader knows nothing. Interestingly the Wikipedia article is second on the list but third on the list is a blog article about Corlears Hook, which gives the date as 23 February 1643 and says Kieft lead the slaughter of 100 Native Americans. If you want this Wikipedia article to be top of the search list, then at least the first sentence of the summary needs to be understandable to readers such as to Google, or someone with a fourth grade education from a third world country who has English as a second language, not someone with a post-graduate degree in Anthropology from an Ivy League University who is already THE subject matter expert. I am not suggesting you leave the ethnographic terms out of the article, just minimize using all those strange and obscure long word in the introduction, when a plainer English description like Native American people would do the job almost as well. Save the big words for the next part of the article, after the lead paragraph has summarized what the article is about and set the scene for the rest of the article. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 11:33, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

Expand scope to Slaughter of the Innocents (1643)?

Perhaps it would be best to expand the scope to cover both this and the Pavonia Massacre in one article, as there is much common material, including the prelude and the aftermath. In addition to the writing of De Vries, it appears a text attributed to Cornelis Melyn also covers the abuses of bodies and prisoners afterward at Fort Amsterdam.--Pharos (talk) 06:54, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Both these massacres are described in their respective geographic articles (Pavonia, New Netherland and Lower East Side) and also in the article about Kieft's War. I would suggest merging with that latter article and developing that broader article's coverage, there, with this information as it will put the full story into its wider historical context and all the information into one place. I don't think we currently need an article just about the "Massacre of the Lenape Indians in 1643" (as Skinner calls this event) until the article about the overall war at least quadruples in size. Once you have 5,000 to 10,000 words written about this event, perhaps it can be spun off into a separate detailed article like this. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 13:32, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

On second thought, probably a more discoverable title would be Massacre at Pavonia and Corlears Hook. This is a step toward merging, but not as much as putting everything into Kieft's War. I do find the summaries at some of the other articles lacking and sometimes inaccurate (those should probably be trimmed), and I think this would be the best place for a coherent, well-researched narrative. I think it's valuable that this is an independent article that can be found in Category:Massacres of Native Americans and linked to directly from other relavant articles, certainly a massacre of over 100 people is notable by any standard.--Pharos (talk) 16:43, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Now that we have two separate articles about these two events, in different locations, I think it unwise to attempt to combine them into a single article about these two separate events. This risks confusion and a misleading history. If you look at sources that have merged the two events you can see it makes for a poore quality article. The reason I suggested putting them both into the article about Kieft's War was because that article is the logical place to start article development without having to worry about notability issues. The massacres are already mentioned there, too, so you can develop the wording of both articles there until they each get so large they each need to be split off into separate "main articles" about these massacres. This also goes for developing the respective sections in the Pavonia, New Netherland and the Lower East Side articles. The advantage of using the article about Kieft's War is that you can develop both massacre articles/sections along side each other initially as separate sections but in one logical place. The common aftermath can then be explained just once in the same article, too. This will minimize duplicated effort and keep the common story more consistent. Once these two sections are large enough, say 5,000 to 10,000 words, they can be split out as main articles for each event, leaving only a summary paragraph or two in Kieft's War. If you did this in the location articles you don't have the option to develop the common events in one place but need to duplicate development in two articles. It is about development options. I think the title on this article is the better than having a title that names two places and two events. - Cameron Dewe (talk) 12:36, 11 June 2021 (UTC)