“Before the White Man Came”
One hundred years ago today … The Home Title Insurance Company of Brooklyn made an unironic appeal to the supposed pioneering spirit of potential new homeowners. Their advertisement featured an illustration meant to represent historical Native American long houses of the region’s first inhabitants, the Canarsie people.
New York Herald, 16 December 1920, p. 3. Chronicling America.
The text that accompanied the ad:
A great canoe with white wings came to anchor off Coney island in the Autumn of 1609. Believing the visitation to be that of the gods, the canarsie Indians created Hendrick Hudson and his crew of Dutch sailors with great friendliness, inviting the visitors to their squalid homes.
The great stretch of fertile upland, then containing a few Indian hunts, later settled by thrifty Dutch and English, now Brooklyn, is a place of homes, real homes, with all the city comforts and convenience of living and Transit, and in addition, something of the old flavor that makes a home town.
Note: NY1920 surveyed 1920 invocations of Native American culture and language for our October 12 Indigenous People’s Day post.
The Home Title Insurance Company’s attempt to link home ownership in Brooklyn and Queens with frontiership finds analogues in recent real estate marketing, which likens gentrification to acting as a “settler.”
– Jonathan Goldman, December 16, 2020
TAGS: Advertising, insurance, boroughs, home ownership, real estate, Native American, indigenous, racism, Queens