“When Lenape scouts first sighted TheHalf Moon with Hudson at its helm, they noted that the captain wore red, a color that signified vitality and warfare, joy and anger. According to [John] Heckewelder, they marveled, ‘He, surely, must be the great Mannitto, but why should he have a white skin?’
Here Heckewelder, writing two centuries later, was projecting his contemporary racial sensibility onto their first impressions. It seems unlikely (as the historian Evan Haefeli has argued) that to Lenape eyes the strangers would have appeared 'white,’ the color of wampum shells and flint. The Dutch, when they controlled the New Netherlands, did not identify themselves as 'white’ but as 'Christians.’ And the Lenape’s own early accounts fixate on the peculiar hairiness of the Europeans rather than their skin color—to a society of men who did not grow beards, the new arrivals seemed more akin to otters or bears. Or else the Lenape commented on their eyes, for where they lived, only wolves had blue or green irises.
According to records from the early eighteenth century, natives and new arrivals in the English colonies rarely remarked on skin color or identified one another in such terms. Yet within a few decades, the division of peoples into a trinity of white, black, and red had become common. Barbados, England’s first plantation colony, was the first to witness the transition from 'Christian’ to 'white,’ as the colonists sought to separate themselves from their slaves, the islanders, and the small but growing caste of people with mixed ancestry. Like a wind, whiteness travelled north and into the Carolinas, as colonialists from Barbados emigrated there. It took a decade to reach the northeast.
Around the early 1720s, indigenous people in the South began to appropriate the label 'red.’ Long before it became a slur, it was a term of empowerment, evoking ardor and prowess in war. When Carl Linnaeus, in 1740, classified the peoples of the New World as 'red’ in his Systema Naturae, red skin became enshrined as a scientific category, though it is no more grounded in biology than in the air.
The Lenape, for their part, called the sunburned strangers Shuwanakuw. The modern Delaware-English dictionary defines this as 'white person.’ Yet Shuwanakuw derives not from the word for white, waapii, but from shuwanpuy, meaning 'ocean, sea, or saltwater.’ White people were those who had emerged from the sea.”