Chief Hopocan

Religious ceremonies were centered around a dedicated "big house." Dreams were considered very significant, so Lenape priests were divided into two classes: those who interpreted dreams and divined the future; and those dedicated to healing. The dead were buried in shallow graves, but method varied considerably: flexed, extended, individually, and sometimes groups. The Lenape believed in a afterlife, but without the Christian concept of heaven and hell - a source of considerable frustration for Moravian missionaries. Lenape were reluctant to tell their real name, and the use of
nicknames was very common. The real name of Captain Pipe, the head of the Delaware Wolf clan in 1775 was Konieschquanoheel "maker of daylight." His nickname, however, was Hopocan meaning "tobacco pipe"

- hence his historical name of Captain Pipe.

Hopocan (Tobacco Pipe) / Captain Pipe / Konieschguanokee / Komeschguanokee (Maker of Day) / Tahunquecoppi [fl. 1764 onwards; died 1794], Munsee/Delaware war chief, Wolf clan; "a sober, sensible Indian"; he attended a conference at the camp at Tuskerawas, October 13 to December 16, 1764; listed in the war losses of the trader Franks on August 19, 1766; succeeded Munsee/Delaware Chief Custaloga [Pakanke] in 1773; moved away from Delaware chief Netawatwees to the south shore of Lake Erie at Cayhoga in 1776; he was the leader of the pro-British Delaware faction, but signed the US Fort Pitt Treaty, September 17, 1778; he lived on the Upper Sandusky River in 1780, and gained control of the Delaware Council at Coshocton in the fall of that year; lived at the headwaters of the Mad River, spring 1781; Captain Pipe, Delaware chief, agreed to bring the Moravians to Detroit under his protection on October 21, 1781; he attended and spoke at councils with the Moravians and the British at Detroit, November 9 and December 8, 1781; with Buckongehelas he defeated the US Militia under the command of Captains Crawford and Williamson on the Sandusky River in June 1782, after the Gnadenhütten massacre; he signed the US Treaty of Fort McIntosh, January 21, 1785; he lived on the south shore of Lake Erie near the Maumee River in 1786; he signed US Treaty of Fort Harmar, January 9, 1789; he informed the Moravians in February, 1791 that they should leave the Huron River because it was unsafe; he attended a council at Niagara to discuss the US Indians, April 14, 1791; he met the
Five Nations in council at the Miami Rapids, August 17, 1792; Captain Pipe / Tahunquecoppi, Delaware Nation, signed the US Peace Treaty at the Miamis Rapids, September 29, 1817 (US 1837; Goddard 1978a: 223; Gray: 54, 56, 62; Kjellberg: 26, 29-30; Tanner 81, 83-84, 89-90; DCB vol. VI: 302; MPHSC vol. X: 527, 538-540, 543, 545, vol. XIII: 42-46, vol. XIX: 276, 374, 690, vol. XX: 66-67, 134, 680, vol. XXIV: 24, 179, 208, 468, 486, 492, vol. XXV: 690; PSWJ vol. V: 355, vol. XI: 435, 724, vol. XII: 1047-1048). 'While you, father are setting me on your enemy, much in the same manner as a hunter sets his dog on the game...I may, perchance, happen to look back to the place from whence you started me, and what shall I see? Perhaps I may see my father shaking hands with the long knives; yes, with these very people he now calls his enemies. I may then see him laugh at my folly for having obeyed his orders; and yet I am now risking my life at his command!' —Detroit, November 9, 1781.
Famous Chiefs

Native Name
Hopocan (Tobacco Pipe) or Konieschquanokee (Maker of Day)

White Name
Captain Pipe

Nation
Delaware

Some say Hopocan or Captain Pipe was born about 1725; others put his birth at 1740. A member of the Munsee or Wolf Clan of the Delaware people, he became Chief of that clan. He was probably born near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Most of the Pennsylvania Delaware had moved to Ohio by 1758. He is first mentioned historically in 1759 at Ft. Pitt. When Fredrick Christian Post was given permission by the Delaware to build a cabin on the Tuscarawas River at present Bolivar, Ohio, Pipe was given the job of marking out the land he was to receive. As one of the three clan chiefs of the Delaware Nation, Pipe had a lot of responsibilities. One of them was to work with the other chiefs to keep the people safe. He had to be a warrior, a negotiator and a good listener to his people. Captain Pipe fought in the French and Indian War and in Pontiac's War where in 1764 Pipe was captured and held prisoner at Ft. Pitt. Col. Henry Bouquet dictated peace terms to the Delaware instead of negotiating with them. Pipe found this very distasteful and it set his opinion of the Shawanock, or Long Knives, for the rest of his life.

In 1778 General Edward Hand of the American Colonial forces killed Captain Pipe's mother, brother and some of his children. Even so he was with Captain White Eyes and Killbuck in 1778 when they signed the first-ever treaty with the Continental Congress and Native people. The Ohio country was to be the Fourteenth State and only for Native people. The Delaware people became divided over which side of the American Revolution they should support. Captain Pipe became the leader of those who supported the British and moved his people to the Sandusky River.

In 1782 Captain Pipe and his people captured Col. Crawford who was held responsible for the murders of Chief Logan's family. Col. Crawford and his men were executed in the same fashion as Logan's family. He participated in many battles and led his people in what he believed was right. Some believe he died in 1794, but proof exists that he was at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, but not at the Greenville Treaty signing. In 1795 a French trader named Jerome built a cabin at what is present Jeromesville in Ashland County, Ohio, on the Jerome Fork of the Mohican River. In 1808-09 early white settlers to the area found Delaware people living at the old Mohican village of Johnstown across the river from Jerome near which was located the home of Old Captain Pipe. Many stories of the settlers and the remaining Delaware talk of Old Captain Pipe living there until 1812. In the spring of 1812 Old Captain Pipe and his people quietly disappear and were never again seen near Jeromesville.

Captain Pipe had a son also named Captain Pipe who signed many treaties and moved with the Delaware people to Kansas. He had no children.

Resources

Captain Pipe http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/ohc/history/h_indian/people/captpipe.shtml

Captain Pipe, 1725-1794 (H for Hopacan) http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/EENALive/bios/A6949BIO.html

Never judge a man unless you've walked a mile in his moccassins. King George W. Bush i spit this in your eye.

"Beginning probably in the 1730s and spreading South, North, and East from the Ohio Valley was an inter-tribal discussion on what encroachment by Europeans meant for Indians. The most influential philosophers of this movement were prophets of a new world order. The most famous of these was Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, who preached that the Indians had collectively sinned by adopting “White people’s ways and nature.” He told a Descartes-style story of sitting alone by the fire, “musing and greatly concerned about the evil ways he saw prevailing among the Indians” when a man appeared who taught him a pure religion that would restore all Indians to a right relationship with the cosmos. Thousands of Indians, seeking wisdom and ready to act, followed Neolin and other prophets in ritual vomiting, witch-hunts, and rejection of European tools and alcohol. Some followers, such as the Ottawa warrior Pontiac, resorted to war in order to jump-start the new Indian renewal.

The impact of colonial expansion, land dispossession, and the trading of goods, specifically
alchohol, was obviously destructive to the Native americans. Although sometimes the Delaware turned to the missions for help and shelter, there was another phenomenon that attempted to deal with colonial influence, and that was prophetic movements. "Prophets and prophecy are an integral part of Native American religions."A prophet or messiah traditionally arises to give hope and direction in times of adversity" (Champagne 675) In the late eighteenth century, a time when the Delaware were threatened by British domination, and continual colonial expansion, several prophets arose to deal with these issues. One is referred to as the militant prophet, Neolin (enlightened one). Neolin had a dream in which the Great Spirit told him that because the Indians gave up their native traditions and accepted goods from the Europeans, the path to heaven was blocked (Champagne 1043) He advocated a tribal coalition that would push back the encroaching British. It is believed that Pontiac an Ottawa chief, was influenced by the Delaware Prophet and subsequently battled the British.

During 1762 there were widespread crop failures and epidemic. At this moment, a native prophet, Neolin (Enlightened), arose among the Delaware villages near the Ohio River. His message - return to traditional ways and reject the white man's trade goods, especially rum. His teachings not only won wide acceptance among the Delaware, but spread to other tribes. To the Kickapoo, nothing could have made more sense, and they became some of his strongest supporters.

Delaware Prophet (dĕl'əwâr, –wər), fl. 18th cent., Native American leader. His real name is not
known. He began preaching (c.1762) among the Delaware of the Muskingum valley in Ohio. He spoke against intertribal war, drunkenness, polygamy, and the use of magic, and he promised his hearers that if they would but heed his words the Native Americans would be strong again and able to resist the whites. He prepared symbolic charts of his message on deerskin and left them in various villages to help his converts teach others. The religious fervor spread rapidly and is said to have been an inspiration to Pontiac. After the collapse of Pontiac's Rebellion (1763–66) the following of the Delaware Prophet waned and was largely superseded by that of the Munsee Prophet, who was in turn succeeded by the Shawnee Prophet.

The British made some attempt to calm the increasingly explosive situation, and in 1762 sent
Lieutenant Thomas Hutchins to Ouiatenon to speak to the Wabash tribes. In the course of the meeting, a Mascouten chief arose to ask Hutchins for supplies for his people who were ill and starving. Hutchins, of course, had nothing to offer except promises. At the same time, a prophet arose among the Delaware adding a religious element to the crisis. Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, taught a rejection of all European trade goods and a return to traditional Native American values. While Neolin did not actually advocate violence, his teachings were seized upon by Pontiac, the Ottawa chief at Detroit and a bitter enemy of the British. Throughout the winter of 1762-63, Pontiac organized a secret uprising which, when it struck the following May, captured six of the nine British forts west of the Appalachian Mountains.

1. Prophets and Messiahs

Movements of nativism (the assertion of traditional values in the face of foreign encroachment) and revitalization (the revival of traditional culture, often involving explicit rejection of European
civilization) have arisen, led by Native American prophets who claimed to have received revelation from the aboriginal deities, often in dreams and visions. These prophets have frequently shown evidence of Christian influence in their moral codes, their missionary zeal, and their concern for personal redemption and social improvement. Sometimes their teachings have led to military advances against European invaders. For example, in the early 1760s the Delaware prophet Neolin helped inspire the rebellion of Ottawa warrior Pontiac against the British. Similarly, the preaching of Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa bolstered the military efforts of his brother Tecumseh against the United States Army between 1808 and 1813. The revivals of preachers such as the Iroquois Handsome Lake in 1799 and the Salish John Slocum in 1882 spawned new religions—part native, part Christian—that have endured in their respective communities to the present day.

One of the most prolonged Native American uprisings took place in the Southwest under the leadership of a Tewa medicine man named Pop, who in 1680 led the various indigenous peoples of present-day New Mexico in a rebellion against Spanish missionaries and conquistadors. The Native Americans drove the Spanish out and kept them at bay for more than a decade. During the Spanish reconquest, the Hopi burned one of their own villages and killed its converted inhabitants rather than allow the reestablishment of Christianity as the official religion. To this day the Hopi pueblos, or villages, resist the influence of Christian religions, although some Hopi have been attracted to the Mormon faith. In hundreds of other cases, indigenous peoples of North America have defied Christian control or endured its presence with only apparent compliance.

2. Ghost Dance

New religious movements among Native Americans have at times taken on the character of crisis cults, which respond to cultural threat with emotional rituals. In 1889 a Paiute prophet named Wovoka foretold the imminent end of the current world order. Casting himself in a messianic role that seemed to be influenced by Christian imagery, Wovoka promised that if Native Americans would conduct a ceremony known as the Ghost Dance, depleted animal populations and deceased relatives would be restored. For several years, many indigenous peoples in the western part of North America performed the ceremony, even after United States Army troops massacred Sioux ghost dancers at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1890."http://www.angelfire.com/realm/shades/nativeamericans/nativeamericanreligions4.htm

 "You complain ... that the animals of the Forest are few and scattered ... You destroy them yourselves for their skins only and leave their bodies to rot or give the best pieces to the Whites. ... You must kill no more animals than are necessary to feed and clothe you" http://www.american-native-art.com/publication/ottawa/ottawa1.shtml

Freedom my ASS, Mr. President

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Lenape
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Lenape
Total population Only 2 pure Lenapes left (As of 1999)
Significant populations in United States (Oklahoma, Kansas, Wisconsin, New Jersey)
Canada (Ontario)
Language English, Delaware
Religion Christianity, other
Related ethnic groups other Algonquian peoples

The Lenape or Lenni-Lenape (later named Delaware Indians by Europeans) were, in the 1600s, loosely organized bands of Native American people practicing small-scale agriculture to augment a largely mobile hunter-gatherer society in the region around the Delaware River, the lower Hudson River, and western Long Island Sound. The Lenape are the people living in the vicinity of New York Bay and in the Delaware Valley at the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th and 17th century. Their Algonquian language is also known as Lenape or Delaware.

Contents

* 1 History
o 1.1 Early Lenape society
o 1.2 Colonial times
o 1.3 The nineteenth century
* 2 Lenape nations today
* 3 Notable Lenape Indians
* 4 References to the Lenape in literature

History

Early Lenape society

Although a different order may have prevailed earlier, in Colonial times Lenape families (like many other Indian peoples) were (are) organized into clans based on a common female ancestor. Phratries, which were groups of two or more clans, were (are) identified by an animal sign. Three Lenape phratries emerge in the early historical record: Turtle (Unami), Turkey (Ungalachtigo), and Wolf (Munsi). These phratries are not political divisions, but rather 'flavors' of individuals common to all discrete bands of Lenape, which together make up the Lenape 'tribe' -- although the very notion of 'tribe' is misleading, suggesting a uniformity that does not exist.

Early Indian 'tribes' are perhaps better understood as language groups, rather than as 'nations.' A Lenape individual has identified primarily with his or her immediate family and friends, or village unit; then with surrounding and familiar village units; next with more distant neighbors who speak the same dialect; and ultimately, while often fitfully, with all those in the surrounding area who speak mutually comprehensible languages, including the Mohican. Those of a different language stock -- such as the Iroquois (or, in the Lenape language, the Minqua) -- were regarded as foreigners, often, as in the Iroquois' case, with animosity spanning many generations. (Interestingly, ethnicity itself seems to have mattered little to the Lenape and many other 'tribes,' as illustrated by archaeological discoveries of Munsee burials that included identifiably ethnic-Iroquois remains carefully interred along with the ethnic-Algonquian Munsee ones. The two groups were bitter enemies since before recorded history, although intermarriage, perhaps through captive-taking, clearly occurred).

Overlaying these relationships is that of the phratry. Phratry membership is matrilineal; that is, a child inherits membership in a phratry from his or her mother. On reaching adulthood, a Lenape traditionally marries outside of his or her phratry, a practice known by ethnographers as "exogamy", which effectively serves to prevent inbreeding even among individuals whose kinship was obscure or unknown.

Early Europeans who first wrote about Indians found this type of social organization to be unfamiliar and perplexing. As a result, Europeans often try to interpret Lenape society through more familiar European arrangements. As a result, their early records are full of clues about early Lenape society, but were usually written by observers who did not fully understand what they were seeing. For example, a man's closest male ancestor was usually considered to be his uncle (his mother's brother) and not his father, since his father belonged to a different phratry. Such a concept is often unfathomable to early European chroniclers.

Land is assigned to a particular clan for hunting, fishing, and cultivation. Individual private ownership of land was unknown, but rather the land belongs to the clan collectively while they inhabit it(see New Amsterdam for discussion of the Dutch "purchase" of Manhattan). Phratries live in fixed settlements, using the surrounding areas for communal hunting and planting until the land is exhausted, at which point the group moved on to found a new settlement.


Colonial times

The early interaction between the Lenape and the Dutch was primarily through the fur trade, specifically the exchange of beaver pelts by the Lenape for European-made goods.

According to Dutch settler Isaac de Rasieres, who observed the Lenape in 1628, the Lenape's primary crop is maize (corn), which they plant in March after breaking up the soil using metal tools traded by the Europeans. In May, the Lenape plant kidney beans in the vicinity of the maize (corn) plants to serve as props. The summers are devoted to field work and the crops are harvested in August. Most of the field work is carried out by women, with the agricultural work of men limited to clearing the field and breaking the soil.

Hunting is the primary activity in the rest of the year. Dutch conqueror/settler David de Vries, who stayed in the area from 1634 to 1644, described a Lenape hunt in the valley of the Achinigeu-hach (or "Ackingsah-sack," the Hackensack River), in which 100 or more men stood in a line many paces from each other, beating thigh bones on their palms to drive animals to the river, where they could be easily killed. Other methods of hunting included lassoing and drowning deer, as well as forming a circle around prey and setting the brush on fire.

The quick dependence of the Lenape on European goods (editors note: the preceeding is a lie), and the need for fur to trade with the Europeans (editor's note: it is the Europeans who always NEED), eventually resulted in a disaster with an overharvesting of the beaver population in the lower Hudson. The fur source thus exhausted, the Dutch shifted their operations to present-day Upstate New York. The Lenape population has fallen into disease and decline. Likewise, the differences in conceptions of property rights between the Europeans and the Lenape resulted in widespread confusion among the Lenape and the loss of their lands. After the Dutch arrival in the 1620s, the Lenape were successfully able to restrict Dutch settlement to present-day Jersey City along the Hudson until the 1660s, when the Dutch finally established a garrison at Fort Bergen, allowing settlement west of the Hudson.

The Treaty of Easton, signed between the Lenape and the English in 1766, removed them westward, out of present-day New York and New Jersey and into Pennsylvania, then Ohio and beyond -- although sporadic raids on English settlers continue, staged from far outside the area.

The nineteenth century

The Lenape were the first Indian tribe to enter into a treaty with the future United States government during the American Revolutionary War. The Lenape supplied the Revolutionary army with warriors and scouts in exchange for food supplies (since they were fucking relocated) and the promise of a role at the head of a future native American state.[1].

The Lenape are continually crowded out by European settlers and pressured to move in several stages over a period of about 175 years with the main body arriving in the Northeast region Oklahoma in the 1860s. Along the way many smaller groups split off in different directions to settle, to join established communities with other native peoples, or to stay where they were and survive while their brothers and sisters moved on. Consequently today, from New Jersey to Wisconsin to southwest Oklahoma, there are groups which retain a sense of identity with their ancestors that were in the Delaware Valley in the 1600s and with their cousins in the vast Lenape diaspora. The two largest are:

* The Delaware Tribe of Indians (Bartlesville, Oklahoma)
* The Delaware Nation (Anadarko, Oklahoma)

Most members of the Munsee branch of the Lenape live on three Indian reserves in Western Ontario, Canada, the largest being that at Moraviantown, Ontario where the Turtle clan settled in 1792.

The Oklahoma branches were established in 1867, with the purchase of land by Delawares from the Cherokee nation; two payments totalling $438,000 were made. A court dispute then followed over whether the sale included rights for the Delaware within the Cherokee nation. In 1898 the Curtis Act dissolved tribal governments and ordered the allotment of tribal lands to individual members of tribes. The Lenape fought the act in the courts but lost, the courts ruling that in 1867 they had only purchased rights to the land for their lifetimes. The lands were allotted in 160 acre (650,000 m²) lots in 1907, with any land left over sold to non-Indians.

In 1979 the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs revoked the tribal status of the Delaware living among Cherokee in Oklahoma, and included the Delaware as Cherokee. This decision was finally overturned in 1996. The Cherokee nation then filed suit to overturn the recognition of the Delaware as a tribe.

In 2000 the Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma took possesion of 11.5 acres of land in Pennsylvania [2].

Lenape nations today

* in Colorado:
o Delaware Tribe of Colorado
* in Delaware:
o Nanticoke Indian Tribe
* in Kansas:
o Christian Munsee (Swan Creek and Black River Chippewa and Munsee)
* in New Jersey:
o Nanticoke Lenape Indians
o Ramapough Mountain Indians
o Unalachtigo Lenape
* in Ohio:
o Delaware Tribe of Ohio
* in Oklahoma:
o Delaware Tribe of Indians (Bartlesville, Oklahoma)
o Delaware Nation (Anadarko, Oklahoma)
* in Ontario:
o Moravian of the Thames First Nation
o Delaware of Six Nations (at Six Nations of the Grand River)
o Munsee-Delaware First Nation
* in Pennsylvania:
o Eastern Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania
o Laurel Rige Lenape Tribe
o Lightning Valley Lenape Tribe


Notable Lenape Indians

* Tamanend -- leader who according to tradition negotiated treaty with William Penn

French and Indian War era:

* Neolin -- the "Delaware Prophet"
* Teedyuscung -- "King" of the eastern Delawares
* Shingas -- Turkey clan war leader
* Tamaqua -- Turkey clan civil leader, aka "King Beaver"

American Revolution era:

* White Eyes -- Turtle clan civil leader
* Killbuck (Gelelemend) -- Turtle clan leader
* Buckongahelas -- Wolf clan war leader
* Captain Pipe -- Wolf clan war chief


References to the Lenape in literature

The Delawares feature prominently in The Last of the Mohicans, a novel by James Fenimore Cooper.

The Delawares are the subject of a legend which inspired the Boy Scouts of America honor society known as the Order of the Arrow.

Fuck Gamblers

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LOST INDIAN TRIBE SURFACES IN JERSEY CITY
BRANCH OF THE LENE LENAPE PLANS TO OPEN CASINO!

Anthony Olszewski
Copyright 2003

A group of Marion and Greenville area residents publicly stated that they are directly descended from Native Americans. Specifically, they trace their lineage to a branch of the Lene Lenape tribe long thought to have been wiped out by Dutch settlers.

Chief Abraham "Fox-that-walks" Petz, owner of "Honest Abe's Pawnshop and Beeper Reconnection Service", says that the tribe has kept it existence secret to this day due to a fear of violence from "colonists and other newcomers." His brother, Martin Samuel Petz, notorious for his part in the Robert Vesco LSD for Alaskan Land deal, declined comment. Tribal Medicine Man, Leroy "Bear-that-stares" Smith would only say that Martin Samuel Petz is no longer a member of the tribe.

Leader of the Tribal Council, Salvatore "Crab-that-swims" Serratte, retired Business Agent of Teamster's Local 560, elaborated on the group's application to open a casino. "Given all the hardship and privation that we was forced to suffer, it's only right that some allowance be made." Salvatore Serratte is featured in another story today. (See below.) The tribe believes that their casino will eventually become "the crown jewel" in a massive recreational complex on the Jersey City waterfront. In their opinion, "this translates into prosperity for all residents of Jersey City."

Chief Petz, pointed to a boulder jutting out from the sidewalk in front of his shop. "That stone has been sacred to our tribe from time immemorial." An elderly neighborhood resident wondered aloud, "But Abe, I remember when your grand-daddy told the contractor that, since he wasn't going to pay no extra to get it tugged out, that rock was just having have to go set there."

The Indians Of New Jersey

MAN GETS 10 DAYS FOR CONTEMPT OF COURT Salvatore Serrate, Jersey City resident, was called to testify in front of a Grand Jury invesstigating illegal gambling activity in Hudson County. After an hour of evasive answers, the judge asked him, "Do you always answer a question with a question?" Salvatore replied, "Why do you ask that, your Honor?" The judge immediately delivered the sentence of 10 days.

Fuck you Bush, fuck you NaziYPigDepartment

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Activists Push Back at NYPD Rescuing Protest Before Bush '04 by Chisun Lee July 2 - 8, 2003

Police arrest a demonstrator during Bush's most recent visit to New York. photo: Michael Appleton

Sharpshooters will man the rooftops. Counterterrorism agents will patrol in civilian guise. Bomb squads will case subway tunnels. At least this much will be certain when the Republican National Convention comes to Madison Square Garden next year, say two former NYPD officials who helped oversee previous conventions there.

And while he won't divulge specifics, police spokesperson Michael Collins says plans are forming more than a year in advance to ensure "the highest levels of security this city has ever seen" when President George W. Bush arrives to be renominated in September 2004.

For the NYPD, in concert with the Secret Service and a slew of federal agencies, maintaining order will be a daunting challenge, and not just because of the obvious terrorism concerns. The Bush administration's policies have roused hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to some of the most heated agitation the city has seen in decades.

Angry protesters have claimed police are meeting these demonstrations with new heights of repressiveness, amounting to a pattern of unfounded arrests and abuses. Now, with an eye to the near future, they are pushing back. A look at the activist scene today reveals a number of challenges that together form a multipronged effort to free the streets. New Yorkers want their right to protest to be as firmly entrenched as the police presence will be come 2004.

---

Fifteen activists were set to file a federal lawsuit July 1 claiming the NYPD trampled on their civil liberties at the massive February 15 anti-war demonstration near the United Nations. Accusing police of interference and abuse—including arbitrary arrests and blocked access to the rally—the complaint will seek damages and a declaration that police violated the constitutional rights of a potentially huge class of participants from the year's biggest protest.

The ranks of the wronged could include "everybody who was denied access to the demonstration site that day because police were blocking off the streets," says William Goodman, former legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents the plaintiffs along with police brutality lawyer Jonathan Moore.

Police refused to issue a permit for a march past the UN, citing security concerns, and instead approved a stationary rally, ultimately located at 51st Street and First Avenue. But to get there, an estimated 100,000 to 400,000 people, of all ages and backgrounds, packed First, Second, and Third avenues, inching along in the frigid cold for hours. Cops wearing riot gear, at metal barricades, in the crowd, and on horseback, tried to shift bodies en masse, mostly away from the side streets. A great many who showed up that day complained of being unable to reach the rally site. Some 300 were arrested.

At minimum, Goodman argues, police robbed legions of their rights to assemble and express their views—through decisions ranging from the denial of the march permit to the handling of the crowds.

Then there are the folks like plaintiff Sara Parkel, a 31-year-old freelance artist from Brooklyn, who was arrested and held overnight, although, she says, "I wasn't doing anything wrong."

"I was always under the assumption that you would be arrested if you did something wrong, like threw a rock," says Parkel. "I wasn't even in the street." Knowing protesters were supposed to stay on the sidewalks, she says she was among the minority who managed to do so. But on a sidewalk on West 39th Street, "I was trapped," she says, when a small army of police pressed the throng around her against a building and began making arrests.

Parkel was locked up with 13 other women in the back of a paddy wagon for approximately four hours, she says. "People were peeing in the back of the truck," because "overloaded" police ignored their pleas to use the bathroom. They also ignored her three or four requests to use the phone once at the Seventh Precinct, where she was held overnight. "Around 1:30 or two in the morning, they called us all in individually," she says, to question the arrestees about their political affiliations and views. "I grew up knowing you're supposed to be read your rights, which we weren't, and you're supposed to be allowed one phone call, which we weren't."

None of the plaintiffs arrested that day was convicted. Says Goodman, "People were arrested in the hundreds, not as a method of legitimate law enforcement, but as crowd control."

The 40-page complaint mentions other wrongs, including people being injured by police horses, manhandled by cops, and denied food and water for many hours. Similar charges appear in a New York Civil Liberties Union report based on a much larger number of complaints from that day, over 300. NYCLU executive director Donna Lieberman knows of about 35 charges from that day that were dropped outright.

Says Parkel, "The arrests were a tactic to discourage people who were talking out against our government." She signed on to the class action "to fight against intimidation." Goodman hopes the lawsuit will make the NYPD more protest-friendly by convention time. "If they get away with it once, they'll do it again," he says.

But police blame the disorder of February 15 on the rally's organizers. The NYPD's Collins says leaders failed to adequately inform people how to get to the protest site and provided too few marshals to manage the crowd. Police acted well within reason, says Collins. "Thousands and thousands of people were not arrested," he points out, when asked about the legitimacy of the several hundred arrests.

---

There is the possibility of another lawsuit by activists, however, which would accuse police of making questionable arrests to deal with demonstrators on yet another occasion.

On the morning of April 7, about 20 people purposely risked arrest by blocking the entrance to the midtown office of the Carlyle Group, a defense-industry investment firm with ties to the Bush administration, to dramatize their opposition to the war in Iraq. Across the street stood some 100 protesters who sought to support those engaging in civil disobedience through lawful means. According to a number of participants, those supporters kept to the sidewalk and left a path clear for pedestrians, as instructed by the First Amendment lawyers there to advise them.

Two of those lawyers told the Voice that a swarm of helmeted police—so many as to seem to outnumber the protesters—abruptly surrounded the group of supporters. Spurning the participants and lawyers, who said the crowd was willing to disperse, police reportedly would not let anyone leave and arrested approximately 80 people, ranging from teens to seniors.

Mark Milano, a longtime organizer with ACT UP/NY, the direct-action AIDS activist group, says, "One of the cops said it was really a preemptive strike, that they thought the people across the street might break the law."

Many charged on April 7 are too angry to take the administrative dismissals that are often offered to resolve minor disorderly conduct charges and vow to fight their cases in court. At least two have gone to trial so far and been acquitted. Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney Nancy Chang says the organization is seriously considering a class action suit against the city, pending the resolution of all the cases. ;Still another battle to protect activists' rights targets the NYPD's use of its newly won power to investigate lawful political activity. ;After September 11, the department claimed it needed that power to root out potential terrorists, who might masquerade as law-abiding New Yorkers. In March 2003 a federal judge agreed to radically weaken a long-standing ban, known as the Handschu agreement, on police investigations of lawful, constitutionally protected activity—a remedy to the politically motivated FBI and police probes of the 1960s and 1970s. ;Since then, hundreds of arrestees from various protests have reported being quizzed, some under duress, on their political views and group memberships. In April, it was revealed that a police intelligence officer had created a "demonstration debriefing form" and computer database to compile such information. Public outcry led the NYPD to destroy the forms and database. But the scandal has prompted a team of civil rights lawyers to challenge the lifting of the old ban on political probes. "That change was based on concerns about investigating terrorism," says Martin Stolar, one of the attorneys. "Now we find out they used [the new powers] on low-level First Amendment protest." The lawyers, who won the original ban on political surveillance in 1985 in an activists' class action suit against the city, want internal police investigation guidelines to be made enforceable through the courts. Political questioning "takes us back to the days of the old Red Squad, where police are keeping dossiers on noncriminal citizens," says Stolar. "If people know they'll end up in a police file, they won't participate in demonstrations." A judge is expected to rule soon. ;Also pending are at least 70 individual grievances that protesters made this year to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent agency that investigates NYPD misconduct. CCRB spokesperson Ray Patterson says the number of protest-related complaints is unusually high. With most, "excessive force was alleged, like use of horses." ;A handful of individuals have filed their own civil suits against the city on protest-related claims. The spate of complaints by activists may signal not necessarily that police tactics have become harsher, but that more people are being exposed to them. Unjustified arrests and rough treatment were always to be found at anti-police-brutality rallies and events like Harlem's Million Youth March, claims activist Wol-san Liem. She and some 80 members of a racially diverse group were arrested this May during three days of planned civil disobedience, dubbed Operation Homeland Resistance. In shifts, they blocked the entrance to 26 Federal Plaza, which houses immigration authorities, in an effort to highlight "the war at home" against the undocumented. "It's interesting to hear white, middle-class protesters talk about how unbelievable it is to them that they were not treated humanely. People of color daily deal with police brutality, and they resist it routinely—that's what the Diallo protests were about," she says. Indeed, the city's protester population has recently burgeoned with additions from across the political spectrum. The numbers promise a rowdier convention than the several Democratic gatherings the city has hosted in the past. "Back then, we were pretty laid-back," says Miami police chief John Timoney, who commanded NYPD operations during the 1992 Democratic convention. He notes that nothing like the September 11 attacks haunted police then, and the issues and the candidate were less controversial. There was no preemptive war on Iraq, no suspicions of political lies about weapons of mass destruction, and there was no great anxiety over losing civil liberties to a White House-led war on terrorism. The traditional convention-protest area, Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets, holds a maximum of about 5,000 bodies, says Timoney. Bush policies have propelled hundreds of thousands into city streets this year. "People are going to be as angry or angrier about the Bush administration as they are now. The fact that there is some possibility of getting rid of this guy will draw a lot of people," predicts Leslie Cagan, lead organizer of United for Peace and Justice. Accused by police of not planning its February 15 anti-war demonstration far enough in advance, UFPJ has already submitted two permit requests for a march and a rally during convention week. The NYCLU asked the police a month ago to begin negotiations for convention protest, says executive director Lieberman, and a meeting is expected as early as July. She says the NYPD's response to current criticism of its protest tactics is a key indicator. "The refusal to acknowledge mistakes will be the single biggest cause for pessimism as we move ahead." The mass arrests and political questioning have already had a chilling effect, according to some activists. Liem says immigrants, especially, find themselves weighing their desire to demonstrate against the risk of detention and even deportation, to themselves and, by association, family and friends. No one, says ACT UP/NY's Milano, should have to "be afraid just to come out to a street protest."