The Montaukett: Jeremiah Pharaoh and a People Still Here

In October 1910, a crowded courtroom in Riverhead held an unusual contradiction. Montaukett people had gathered to hear the outcome of a case brought by their chief, Wyandank Pharaoh, over their rights at Montauk. Justice Abel Blackmar announced his conclusion: the Montaukett tribe had “disintegrated” and no longer existed as a tribe. Historian John A. Strong describes the Montaukett people in the courtroom sitting in stunned silence as they heard the decision.¹

The ruling would have lasting consequences for Montaukett land rights and New York State recognition. It also creates a strange image that is difficult to forget once it is seen clearly: living Montaukett people were sitting in the room while a government institution declared their collective existence finished.

How does a people become invisible while its members are still standing in front of you?

Part of the answer lies in where history teaches us to look. Indigenous people are often attached to territories on maps and described through snapshots of life from a particular period. When the people move, their work changes, their families intermarry, or their material culture evolves, the map can appear to empty even though the people themselves continue through history.

One Montaukett man who lived about a century before the 1910 ruling gives us a remarkably human way to see that process. His name was Jeremiah Pharaoh, and the traces he left behind lead from a tiny house at Indian Fields in Montauk to Nantucket and the global whaling trade, then back home again.²

Jeremiah was only one man, and his experience cannot stand in for the thousands of individual Montaukett lives that came before, during, and after his own. What his story can do is remind us to look for those lives. Every person carried a different combination of family, work, beliefs, relationships, hardships, ambitions, traditions, and adaptations through the same changing world.

Before Jeremiah: Life on the East End

The Montaukett homeland centered on the South Fork of Long Island, with Montauk holding particular importance. Archaeological and historical research shows a landscape used through settlement, fishing, shellfishing, hunting, gathering, planting, craft, trade, and movement along both the northern and southern coasts of the South Fork.² ³ Relationships also extended beyond Montauk through kinship, exchange, diplomacy, and travel among Native communities elsewhere on Long Island and around coastal southern New England.

The geography helps explain the breadth of those activities. Eastern Long Island brings together ocean, bays, tidal wetlands, freshwater ponds, beaches, woodlands, grasslands, fisheries, shellfish beds, migratory birds, and terrestrial game within a relatively small area. Strong’s research into Long Island’s Indigenous maritime traditions documents people harvesting shellfish and fish, hunting waterfowl and marine animals, and developing the boating and hunting skills that later became highly valuable to colonial whaling operations.³

Life across that landscape changed with the seasons, available resources, family needs, and relationships with neighboring communities. There was never one universal “day in the life” that could describe every Montaukett person across generations. A community is made from many lives taking place at once.

European colonization added new people, materials, laws, markets, religions, and political pressures to that existing world. By the seventeenth century, English settlement on the South Fork was expanding eastward, bringing livestock onto Montaukett land and increasingly restricting where Montaukett people could hunt, plant, graze animals, or establish homes.² ⁴ At the same time, Native and colonial lives were becoming economically intertwined through trade, employment, manufactured goods, maritime work, and exchange.

The East End was becoming a crossroads of humanity. The Montaukett did not stand outside that changing world watching it arrive. They were participants in it.

The Whale Changed the Crossroads

Whaling became one of the clearest places where Indigenous and colonial worlds met. English settlers recognized that Native men already possessed maritime hunting and boating skills well suited to pursuing whales from small boats in rough coastal waters. By the late seventeenth century, Indigenous crews had become central to Long Island’s growing commercial shore-whaling industry.³

The work could be dangerous and economically complicated. Native whalers sometimes received valuable goods or wages for skills colonial operators badly needed, while systems of debt and credit could also bind men to future seasons of work. Strong documents whaling agreements in which Indigenous men owed merchants enough money that their labor in the next whale season was committed in advance.³

As shore whaling declined and the industry moved farther offshore, the geographic scale of the work expanded dramatically. Native whalers from Long Island and southern New England increasingly entered deep-sea voyages, joining multiracial crews and maritime networks that could carry them thousands of miles from home.²

That was the world Jeremiah Pharaoh entered.

Jeremiah Goes to Nantucket

Jeremiah’s own surviving words tell us that on March 3, 1798, he arrived back at Montauk after being away for nine years and five months. He wrote that he had sailed out of Nantucket and elsewhere described himself as “Jeremiah Pharaoh the Bold mariner,” saying he had sailed “the world all over.”²

Those nine years should not be imagined as one uninterrupted voyage. They were nine years away from Montauk, during which Nantucket became an important part of Jeremiah’s life as well as a base for his whaling work. In 1794, while he was living within that wider maritime world, Jeremiah married Aloosa Tallman in Nantucket.²

That makes his eventual return more interesting. Jeremiah had worked within an international industry, spent years based away from Long Island, developed relationships in Nantucket, married there, and traveled far beyond the East End. Yet when he recorded the end of that long absence in 1798, he described himself as returning home to Montauk.²

His world had expanded without requiring one place or identity to replace another. Jeremiah could be a Montaukett man, a Nantucket-based whaler, a husband, an international sailor, and eventually a resident of Indian Fields at the same time.

That kind of complexity seems perfectly normal when applied to people living today. It becomes important when looking at Indigenous history because movement and adaptation were later used as evidence that Native communities were somehow fading away.

Coming Home to Indian Fields

Jeremiah and Aloosa established a household at Indian Fields, a Montaukett settlement at Montauk. An 1806 enumeration records Jeremiah living there with his wife and son, and archaeology has connected their family to a small house whose material remains survived long after the people themselves disappeared from the written record.²

The house was roughly fourteen feet square, about the floor area of a modest modern bedroom. Portions of its construction incorporated fieldstone, and McGovern’s analysis places it within a broader tradition of Native homes in the region that could combine Indigenous and European architectural forms.² The building itself therefore reflects the same kind of cultural crossroads visible elsewhere in Jeremiah’s life.

Then there is the object that makes the connection unusually personal.

Among the material recovered from the household was a carved mammal-bone knife handle. “Jeremiah” had been cut into one side and “Pharaoh” into the other.² Archaeology rarely provides such a direct handshake across centuries: an everyday object recovered from a house with the name of the person who lived there scratched into it.

The thousands of other fragments from the site begin to feel different once the person has a name. Fish bones, shells, pieces of ceramic, buttons, needles, glass, stone flakes, gun parts, and household tools stop being a catalog of archaeological finds and become traces of meals cooked, clothes repaired, tools used, and objects misplaced in one family’s home. That is where archaeology becomes a story about people.

A Montaukett Household in a Global World

Jeremiah and Aloosa’s household drew heavily from the landscape around Montauk. Fish and turtle make up large proportions of the animal remains recovered at the site, accompanied by oysters, clams, birds, and smaller quantities of terrestrial animals. Evidence of gun use, fishing, and shellfish gathering provides additional clues to how food reached the household.²

At the same time, the family’s belongings reached far beyond Long Island. Archaeologists recovered refined earthenwares used for meals and tea, glass bottles, metal dining utensils, sewing equipment, manufactured buttons, and an unusual enamel-painted European glass mug.² Some of those objects had traveled farther to reach Jeremiah’s home than many people of the period traveled in their entire lives.

Older technologies remained beside the newer ones. Quartz and other stone tools occurred in the same archaeological contexts as metal tools and ammunition, while dozens of bone needles associated with basket and mat making were recovered alongside metal sewing implements.² The household did not divide neatly into an “Indigenous” half and a “European” half. It was simply the material world Jeremiah and Aloosa inhabited.

That mixture should feel familiar. People have always adopted useful objects, techniques, foods, fashions, and technologies from the wider worlds they encounter. Doing so does not require surrendering every identity and relationship that existed beforehand.

Jeremiah’s household makes that process visible in a particularly intimate way. A man could sail internationally, drink tea from imported ceramics, use commercially manufactured metal tools, eat fish caught close to home, work stone when stone remained useful, and return to a Montaukett community at Indian Fields.²

All of those things could be true at once.

Aloosa & the Lives That Leave Fewer Records

Jeremiah’s whaling gave him a kind of visibility that many people never receive in historical records. Ships kept records, merchants kept accounts, and his own writings preserved pieces of his travels. Aloosa is much more difficult to follow.

McGovern found the record of Aloosa’s 1794 marriage to Jeremiah in Nantucket, but archival research has not established her ancestry with confidence.² She later lived with Jeremiah at Indian Fields, and the archaeological household belonged to both of them, yet many of the personal details that survive for her husband simply do not survive for her.

The material record does reveal the amount of work taking place within the home. Needles, buttons, pins, awls, craft materials, food remains, and other household objects document sewing, food preparation, and craft activity. McGovern also examined account books from other Indian Fields residents showing men and women fishing, gathering oysters, making baskets, caning chairs, working for neighboring households, and exchanging labor and local resources for staples such as corn, wheat, potatoes, pork, and molasses.²

Those specific transactions cannot simply be assigned to Aloosa, but they reveal the economic world in which she lived. When Jeremiah was away at sea for long periods, maintaining their household required someone at home to manage food, work, exchange, property, and daily life.

History tends to notice the person who sails over the horizon. Archaeology sometimes helps us notice the people who kept everything running after the ship disappeared from view.

One Man Among Thousands

Jeremiah’s story becomes most useful when it reminds us how many other stories existed around him. Another Montaukett person living at the same time might never have gone to sea. Someone else could have worked primarily through fishing, farming, domestic labor, craft, trade, or another occupation, while families differed in religion, wealth, mobility, marriage connections, and access to land.

Those individual lives also changed over time. A person’s work at twenty could differ from his work at fifty. Families moved, children married into other communities, economic opportunities appeared and disappeared, and technologies that once seemed novel became ordinary household objects.

McGovern uses the concept of survivance to interpret this larger Montaukett history. Her research challenges the older “vanishing Indian” narrative by following the ways Montaukett people maintained social networks, households, subsistence strategies, work, identity, and community through enormous economic and political change.⁴

Jeremiah allows that scholarly idea to become concrete. He did not remain unchanged, and neither did the world around him. His life moved through different places and phases while Montauk remained home and Montaukett remained part of who he was. Thousands of other lives carried their own versions of that complexity.

Look for the People, Not Only the Place

This is where maps can become deceptive.

If someone had visited Montauk during Jeremiah’s long absence and looked only for him there, Jeremiah would have been gone. Early federal census practices also excluded many Native people from ordinary enumeration, while whalers and seafarers could be absent when local records were created.² A person could therefore become difficult to see on paper without disappearing from life.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Montaukett families also established homes elsewhere on the East End. Freetown in East Hampton became one important example: a multiracial community whose history includes African American, Montaukett, and other working-class families. McGovern and anthropologist Anjana Mebane-Cruz have shown how a twentieth-century Montaukett home there later became obscured when the neighborhood’s history was placed primarily within a single racial category.⁵

Those categories mattered because official documents helped shape later historical memory. A census taker or clerk might classify someone according to the racial system of the time, while the person and family being classified could understand their own identity through ancestry, kinship, community, and relationships that the form did not record.⁴ ⁵

Follow only the label on the document or the population inside a fixed boundary, and the Montaukett can appear to diminish from view. Follow families and communities across the landscape, and the story continues.

The Pharaoh Name Continues

Jeremiah’s own documented family line becomes difficult to follow. His only known son, also named Jeremiah, was born in 1802 and died six years later. McGovern found no evidence showing that Jeremiah and Aloosa’s Indian Fields home passed to another child or relative, so there is no responsible basis for drawing a direct genealogical line from this Jeremiah Pharaoh to the Pharaoh families living on the East End today.²

The surname itself, however, continues to appear within Montaukett community history. The Eastville Community Historical Society documents Montaukett Pharaoh families living in the Sag Harbor-Eastville community from the early twentieth century into the present, while historic photographs and family records preserve other Pharaohs associated with Montaukett life.⁶ Different branches have their own genealogies, and a shared surname does not make every person a direct descendant of Jeremiah.

What the name offers instead is a loose thread through the community’s history. Family names such as Pharaoh, Cuffee, Fowler, and others recur across East End Native records because communities are made from families whose branches cross, separate, marry, move, and continue in different directions.

Today, Robert Pharaoh is Chief of the Montaukett Indian Nation.⁷ More than two centuries after Jeremiah wrote his own name into the historical record, the same surname remains closely associated with Montaukett public life without requiring an invented family line between the two men. Then another Pharaoh brings us back to the courtroom.

1910: When Change Became “Disappearance”

Wyandank Pharaoh was Chief of the Montaukett when the land case eventually known as Pharaoh v. Benson reached Justice Abel Blackmar. In October 1910, he and other Montaukett people were present in the Riverhead courtroom when the judge announced that the tribe had ceased to exist.¹

Blackmar’s reasoning is striking when read after Jeremiah’s story. The judge described Montaukett people leaving Montauk for extended periods to work elsewhere and treated their changing social and economic lives as part of the evidence that the tribe had disintegrated.¹ The very mobility and adaptation visible throughout the preceding century became part of a legal narrative of disappearance.

Jeremiah had already lived a life that exposes the weakness in that logic. He spent nine years and five months away from Montauk, married in Nantucket, worked in an international industry, traveled widely, used imported goods, and participated in an economy that stretched far beyond Long Island. When he returned in 1798, he still understood Montauk as home.²

The people in Blackmar’s courtroom carried their own equally complicated histories. Their lives had moved through colonization, land loss, wage labor, migration, intermarriage, Christianity, industrialization, and changing racial classifications. Those changes were evidence that history had happened to them, just as history happens to every living community.

While the legal decision interpreted that movement as an ending, there is no doubt that the people continued living after the ruling.

Riders of History

There is a persistent habit of looking for Indigenous authenticity in stillness. Popular history often imagines a culture at a single chosen moment and then measures everything that follows according to how closely later generations resemble that picture.

No living culture works that way.

The Montaukett moved through history as active participants. Whaling opened international worlds to people such as Jeremiah. Colonial markets introduced new goods and forms of work. Christianity influenced beliefs and community life. Families moved as land access changed. Industrialization transformed Long Island, and racial systems imposed new categories on families whose relationships did not always fit neatly inside them.⁴ ⁵

Some practices endured through those changes, some evolved, and others diminished or were lost. New skills, technologies, relationships, and traditions entered people’s lives as well. The resulting history is complicated because human lives are complicated.

The Montaukett were riders of history, experiencing its changes rather than remaining outside them as artifacts from an earlier age. Survivance does not ask us to pretend that nothing changed. It asks us to recognize the people who continued through the change.

Jeremiah Pharaoh makes that easy to see because so many shades of his life survive in the record. He was local and widely traveled, tied to an ancestral homeland and connected to global commerce, surrounded by Indigenous technologies and imported objects, away from Montauk for years and still capable of returning home.

His complexity was human, a reality many of us live in our own lives. There were thousands of other complex Montaukett lives around and after him, each unique and varied.

The State & the Montaukett Meet Again

The consequences of the 1910 ruling continue into the present. New York’s current recognition legislation explicitly states that Montaukett recognition was improperly removed through Pharaoh v. Benson and seeks to reinstate the Montaukett Indian Nation within state law.⁸

The political process has repeated itself several times. Recognition bills have passed the State Legislature only to be vetoed by governors, most recently including Governor Kathy Hochul. In December 2025, Hochul vetoed another bill after writing that unresolved questions remained concerning Montaukett eligibility for recognition under what she called traditional criteria.⁹

The scene no longer resembles the Riverhead courtroom of 1910. A modern governor does not need Montaukett citizens physically seated in front of her while a decision is read aloud. Government submissions, electronic communication, public testimony, news coverage, cultural events, social media, photographs, local proclamations, and the Nation’s own advocacy make distance very different in the twenty-first century.

The emotional echo is nevertheless difficult to miss. In 1910, Montaukett people sat before the state while a judge concluded that their tribe no longer existed. In 2025, Montaukett leaders and citizens were publicly visible and actively petitioning the state while legal recognition was again withheld. The issue in both moments was a government’s willingness to acknowledge a political identity carried by people whose physical existence was readily apparent.¹ ⁷ ⁹

New York legislators introduced another recognition bill in February 2026. It passed the Assembly on March 9 and the Senate on May 12 by a vote of 60–0. As of August 2026, the Legislature lists the measure as having passed both chambers and awaiting the next stage of the process.⁸

The legal story continues, and so does the human one.

The Montaukett are Still Here

Chief Robert Pharaoh and Montaukett executive director Sandi Brewster-Walker represent the Nation publicly today. East Hampton Town honored them together in 2024 while formally recognizing the continuing presence and contributions of the Montaukett community, and Brewster-Walker has emphasized that Montaukett history extends beyond the boundaries of East Hampton itself.⁷ ¹⁰

That wider geography brings the story back to where it began. Looking only at a space on a map can make people appear to disappear when they move beyond its edges. Looking instead at families, relationships, work, communities, and individual lives reveals continuity that a boundary or census category can miss.

Jeremiah Pharaoh offers one particularly vivid example. He left Montauk for nearly a decade, married in Nantucket, sailed through an international maritime world, and eventually came home to a fourteen-foot-square house where archaeology found local foods beside imported ceramics and stone technology beside manufactured metal tools.² His life changed repeatedly without becoming detached from Montaukett history.

Jeremiah’s was one story among many. Other Montaukett people traveled different roads, stayed closer to home, practiced different trades, formed different families, embraced different beliefs, and responded differently to the pressures and possibilities around them. Together, those lives carried the community through centuries that transformed nearly everything about Long Island.

A court could erase a tribe in a legal decision. A census could choose a different racial category. A map could stop showing a community where earlier generations expected to find it. None of those documents contained every relationship through which people understood themselves.

The Montaukett did not remain frozen in the world Jeremiah knew, any more than the rest of Long Island did. They moved through the same centuries, adapting to new economies, technologies, places, and circumstances while carrying identity and community forward in changing forms.

More than two hundred years after Jeremiah Pharaoh returned home, and more than a century after Montaukett citizens listened while a judge declared their tribe gone, their history is still being written by Montaukett people themselves.

They are not artifacts of Long Island history, they are participants in it.

And they are still here.

References

¹ Strong, John A. “Who Says the Montauk Tribe Is Extinct? Judge Abel Blackmar’s Decision in Wyandank v. Benson (1909).” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1992): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicr.16.1.46204j824h443683

² McGovern, Allison Manfra. “The Materiality of a ‘Bold Mariner’: Jeremiah Pharaoh’s Home at Indian Fields.” Long Island History Journal 25, no. 1 (2016).
https://lihj.cc.stonybrook.edu/2016/articles/the-materiality-of-a-bold-mariner-jeremiah-pharaohs-home-at-indian-fields/

³ Strong, John A. “Indian Whalers on Long Island, 1669–1746.” Long Island History Journal 25, no. 1 (2016).
https://lihj.cc.stonybrook.edu/2016/articles/indian-whalers-on-long-island-1669-1746/

⁴ McGovern, Allison Manfra. Disrupting the Narrative: Labor and Survivance for the Montauketts of Eastern Long Island. Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2015.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1045/

⁵ McGovern, Allison Manfra, and Anjana Mebane-Cruz. “Mapping Memories of Freetown: The Meanings of a Native American House in a Black Neighborhood.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8, nos. 1–2 (2019): 131–146.
https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2019.1650475

⁶ Eastville Community Historical Society. “Eastville Walking Tour,” section “38 Hempstead Street and the Pharaoh Family.” Accessed August 12, 2026. See also East Hampton Library, Long Island Collection, “Montauk Indians, 1924,” photograph depicting members of the Pharaoh and Fowler families.
https://www.eastvillehistorical.org/eastville-walking-tour

⁷ Gangemi, Christopher. “Town Recognizes the Montaukett Indian Nation.” The East Hampton Star, November 14, 2024.
https://www.easthamptonstar.com/government/20241114/town-recognizes-montaukett-indian-nation

⁸ New York State Legislature. Assembly Bill A10129, 2025–2026 Legislative Session. “Relates to the reinstatement of state recognition and acknowledgement of the Montaukett Indian Nation.” Passed Assembly March 9, 2026; passed Senate May 12, 2026, 60–0. Accessed August 12, 2026.
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A10129

⁹ Walsh, Christopher. “Montaukett Recognition Vetoed Again.” The East Hampton Star, December 25, 2025. See also New York State Legislature, Assembly Bill A5295, 2025–2026 Legislative Session, vetoed December 19, 2025, Veto Memo 129.
https://www.easthamptonstar.com/government/20251225/montaukett-recognition-vetoed-again

¹⁰ Friends of Plum Island. “Who We Are: Sandi Brewster-Walker.” Biography identifying Brewster-Walker as an enrolled citizen of the Montaukett Indian Nation and its Executive Director and Government Affairs Officer. Accessed August 12, 2026.
https://www.friendsofplumisland.org/who-we-are

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