360° Historiography: Beatrice Glow’s Counternarrative to Dutch Colonial History
In 1624, the Dutch East India Company landed in present-day Tainan, founding Fort Zeelandia as a key outpost, while the Dutch West India Company established New Amsterdam—now New York. Four centuries later, Tainan’s Tainan 400 event framed this as the city’s founding moment, subtly reinforcing colonial erasure. Meanwhile, New York’s Future 400, led by the Dutch Consulate, emphasized “Dutch-New York history” and provided a platform for “others who share this common heritage” to express their views. While this approach helps prevent the complete erasure of Indigenous continuity, it still risks relegating Indigenous-descendant communities to a marginal status. In both cases, colonial histories are sanitized by referring to them as a simple “encounter,” overlooking the complex legacies of dispossession and violence. Interestingly, the Future 400 brochure cover features a Delftware-style horn-shaped gunpowder container inscribed with “Pax Hollandica,” a term that euphemistically represents the Dutch colonial suppression of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples.1
This piece of art, resembling a historical relic, challenges the narrative by masquerading into the Future 400’s celebration while connecting to critical moments of maritime colonization. Made by Taiwanese-American artist Beatrice Glow, whose maternal Hakka roots trace back to Sandimen—an Indigenous town in southern Taiwan—Pax Hollandica (2022) was part of Glow’s solo exhibition, When Our Rivers Meet, at the New-York Historical Society, part of the Future 400 series. Glow considers it her most “autobiographical” piece, with the surrounding areca palm leaves referencing the Dutch East India Company’s landdag ceremony, wherein Indigenous leaders were compelled to offer gifts as part of the land cession.
The front page of Future 400 brochure features Beatrice Glow’s 2022 work, Pax Hollandica.
Since 2016, Glow has anchored her artistic research in historical archives documenting Dutch maritime colonization spanning North America and Asia, working closely with Indigenous communities to forge expressions of counternarratives. She reconfigures objects, drawing on digital media and even olfactory experiences to reconstruct untold narratives that challenge imperial perspectives, envisioning a more egalitarian historiography in active dialogue.
One of Glow’s earlier works engaging with New York’s colonial history was Mannahatta VR, developed in 2016 during her time as an artist-in-residence at New York University, in collaboration with several Lenape culture bearers whose families trace to New York City. In the VR piece, viewers, wearing headsets, find themselves immersed in a pre-colonial Broadway, hearing Lenape elders share their stories and ideals. The interactive design allows viewers to challenge existing stereotypes and biases. For instance, one is invited to shoot down a Dutch monument in Battery Park that commemorates the false history of the Lenape selling Manhattan to the Dutch. After toppling the monument, the holographic presence of Turtle Clan’s Chief Mann would shine in the sky, accompanied by stars representing the three main clans of the Lenape––Wolf, Turtle, and Turkey––along with the Lenape names of local plants. VR brings hidden histories to life, offering the possibility of seeing history from an Indigenous perspective.
As Glow’s first foray into VR, the medium was introduced to Lenape elders, who not only embraced it but also recognized its power as a teaching tool—some even envisioning a future where their virtual selves could guide coming generations. In this way, Mannahatta VR goes beyond merely archiving oral history—it’s a gateway to innovative historical education and public memory. The flexibility of VR also allows Glow and her collaborator Alexandre Girardeau to respond to different cultural traditions. In the 2019 version, slogans like “how can we expand knowledge of Indigenous Manhattan?” appeared as background prompts for viewers. By 2022, the piece expanded further, drawing attention to the industrial pollution of Indigenous lands by the Ford Motor Company, urging action and awareness.
The Dutch monument in Battery Park featured in Mannahatta VR—a symbol of the false history that claims the Lenape sold Manhattan to the Dutch. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist.
Building on this collaboration, Glow was able to extend her work during her 2022–2024 residency at the New-York Historical Society, culminating in When Our Rivers Meet, where, alongside a diverse group of cultural bearers, she revisited and ultimately reinterpreted the 1909 archive of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration—a commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of New York and the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s steamship invention. The celebration featured parades, fireworks, flotillas, and light displays, including one of the 54 parade floats, which was divided into stages of linear progression from the era of Indian to Dutch, British, and American—intentionally designed to encourage new immigrants to internalize the imperial narrative of New York’s history.
Glow invited nine groups of partners impacted by Dutch colonialism to create a series of seven parade float maquettes. Among these, the float model All Islands Connect Underwater (2023), inspired by the traditional Banda kora-kora boat, symbolizes ships as vessels of trade, warfare, and rituals, linking New Amsterdam and the Indonesian archipelago. The involvement of Wim Manuhutu and Nancy Jouwe—collaborators who previously worked with Glow on a forum reflecting on the Dutch East India Company’s massacre in the Banda Islands 400 years ago—positions this float model as a deliberate counternarrative to the myth of New York’s prosperity.
Installation view: Beatrice Glow, When Our Rivers Meet, New-York Historical Society, 2024. © Beatrice Glow. Image courtesy of the artist and New-York Historical Society. Photo: Glenn Castellano.
In developing the float maquette series, Glow articulated her intention to transform the archival study into an opportunity to “widen the circle and tell our stories together.”2 This involved re-examining archives and a decoding of the settler colonial narratives embedded within them. As noted by longtime collaborator and Indigenous educator Brent Stonefish, the “Indian Era” float was accompanied by a crowd dressed in imagined Indigenous regalia, many of whom were non-Native. Meanwhile, the “Dutch Era” float, drawing inspiration from “the first ship in Manhattan,” failed to acknowledge the Lenape people’s long-standing traditions of river navigation. Both examples reveal the recurring motifs of settler colonial fiction and its erasures.3
In response, Glow and Stonefish redesigned the New York City seal from a Lunaapeew perspective, reimagining an alternative timeline where the Dutch and Indigenous peoples had established mutually beneficial relationships rather than engaging in violence and conflict. This vision asks what a more inclusive and harmonious future might look like—one where humanity didn’t attempt to conquer nature but instead coexisted with it. In an interview, Stonefish mentioned that when the Dutch first arrived in Manhattan, the Lenape people actually offered friendly assistance to the Dutch, who were struggling with the land. Unfortunately, the Dutch did not repay this kindness, but instead massacred and drove the Lenape people all the way to Ohio and even Ontario, Canada, displacing them for over three hundred years. They replaced the original image with a Dutch and Native woman under the Tree of Life, surrounded by children and supported by a large turtle at the bottom—symbolizing Turtle Island, the Indigenous name for North America. This transformation honors the matrilineal traditions of the Lenape while subtly invoking a more inclusive and peaceful feminine perspective. It aims to heal past wounds through a lens of femininity, in contrast to the violent, male-driven conquests of history.
Beatrice Glow, Nancy Jouwe, Wim Manuhutu, All Islands Connect Underwater, 2023, VR-sculpted photopolymer and polylactic acid bioplastic 3D print, acrylic paint, enamel coating. Courtesy of Beatrice Glow.
Unlike Mannahatta VR, which emphasizes pre-contact imagery, the parade float maquettes series engages with the legacy of colonial historiography while incorporating decolonial perspectives. Though the maquettes represent only a symbolic justice, they are among the few artistic practices fostering discussions on Dutch colonial history on a transnational scale. Glow, drawing from a Taiwanese Indigenous lineage, acts as an active ally, engaging in dialogue and collaboration with partners from the Banda Islands, the Lenape People in New York, and others. This approach examines the colonial legacies of the Dutch East India and West India Companies from a broader comparative viewpoint, seeking cross-cultural dialogue within the global colonial network.
A 360° historiography goes beyond the use of VR; it denotes a global orientation in mapping the colonial network, requiring collaboration across diverse identities and disciplines, where multiple perspectives converge. Glow not only uses VR for presentation but also models and sculpts object details within the VR headset. This approach allows remote partners to engage in discussions, ensuring that all details are finalized by mutual agreement before 3D printing and further refinement into the final object. In contrast to Glow’s meticulous communication and the emphasis on respecting Indigenous allyship in exhibitions and public talks, which use art as a platform to challenge and reconstruct colonial narratives, the main narratives of Tainan 400 and Future 400 subtly sidestep the term colonialism, thus reflecting the ongoing need for progress in transitional justice. While Indigenous participation is visible, it often remains supplementary, offering an additional perspective rather than prompting deeper structural reflection. Alak Akatuan, an activist for the cultural revitalization of the Siraya people, whose traditions thrived long before the Dutch arrived in Tainan, urges that the commemoration of 1624 must begin with an apology to Indigenous peoples before progressing into deeper future dialogue.4 As the impacts of four centuries of colonial violence continue to reverberate worldwide, Glow’s practice affirms that commemorative events should not merely display history but act as moments to rethink who holds the authority to interpret the past. Artists, by presenting counternarratives, have the potential to challenge existing power structures and create space for lasting change.
Translated by Zian Chen
1 For the statement and the brochure, see: Future 400 website.
2 See the artist’s interview on the exhibition.
3 See the online forum records of the artist and collaborators.
4 Among the Future 400 activities, New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam invited Lenape chiefs to respond to a disputed Dutch letter claiming they had “purchased” New Amsterdam for 60 guilders, displaying their response alongside it. On another occasion, during the opening of Manahahtáanung or New Amsterdam, curated with input from the leadership of the four Lenape nations, Lenape representatives called for an apology from the Netherlands for the 17th-century enslavement of Indigenous peoples. They also proposed reparations to support cultural revitalization and elder care. While Tainan 400 features two exhibitions that foreground the long-standing presence of the Siraya Plains Indigenous peoples—titled More Than 400 Years, and A Millennial Gaze on 400—another exhibition, Transcending 1624, held at the National Museum of Taiwan History, confronts the historical persecution of Siraya priestesses by Dutch missionaries.
Tainan 400 does feature two complementary exhibitions that have highlighted the long-standing presence of the Siraya Plains Indigenous peoples—Far More Than Just 400 Years and A Millennial Gaze on 400 Years, though these exhibitions are presented solely in Chinese, with no English announcements available. Additionally, a larger exhibition, Transcending 1624, held at the National Museum of Taiwan History, has narrated the historical persecution of Siraya priestesses by Dutch missionaries. Yet despite these efforts, concrete proposals or meaningful actions to address colonial trauma and repair interethnic relations remain absent. The very framing of “Tainan 400” is still tethered to a narrative of city founding, shaped by colonial and developmental logic. In response, Uma Talavan has proposed reframing it as “Tainan 400+” to signal a commitment to Indigenous justice and to open space for a more inclusive future.