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Though it is well established that indigenous Native Americans occupied what are today known as Long Island and Fire Island for many centuries before Europeans arrived, there has existed a long-standing myth that Long Island and nearby Fire Island were occupied by “thirteen tribes” “neatly divided into thirteen tribal units, beginning with the Canarsie who lived in present-day Brooklyn and ending with the Montauk on the far eastern end of the island.” Modern ethnographic research indicates, however, that before the European invasion, Long Island and Fire Island were occupied by “indigenous groups […] organized into village systems with varying levels of social complexity. They lived in small communities that were connected in an intricate web of kinship relations […] there were probably no native peoples living in tribal systems on Long Island until after the Europeans arrived. […] The communities appear to have been divided into two general culture areas that overlapped in the area known today as the Hempstead Plains […]. The western groups spoke the Delaware-Munsee dialect of Algonquian and shared cultural characteristics such as the longhouse system of social organization with their brethren in what is now New Jersey and Delaware. The linguistic affiliation of the eastern groups is less well understood […] Goddard […] concluded that the languages here are related to the southern New England Algonquian dialects, but he could only speculate on the nature of these relationships […]. Working with a few brief vocabulary lists of Montauk and Unquachog, he suggested that the Montauk might be related to Mohegan-Pequot and the Unquachog might possibly be grouped with the Quiripi of western Connecticut. The information on the Shinnecock was too sparse for any determination […] The most common pattern of indigenous life on Long Island prior to the intervention of the whites was the autonomous village linked by kinship to its neighbors.”

“Most of the ‘tribal’ names with which we are now familiar do not appear to have been recognized by either the first European observers or by the original inhabitants until the process of land purchases began after the first settlements were established. We simply do not know what these people called themselves, but all the ethnographic data on North American Indian cultures suggest that they identified themselves in terms of lineage and clan membership. […] The English and Dutch were frustrated by this lack of structure because it made land purchase so difficult. Deeds, according to the European concept of property, had to be signed by identifiable owners with authority to sell and have specific boundaries on a map. The relatively amorphous leadership structure of the Long Island communities, the imprecise delineation of hunting ground boundaries, and their view of the land as a living entity to be used rather than owned made conventional European real estate deals nearly impossible to negotiate. The surviving primary records suggest that the Dutch and English remedied this situation by pressing cooperative local sachems to establish a more structured political base in their communities and to define their communities as “tribes” with specific boundaries […] The Montauk, under the leadership of Wyandanch in the mid-seventeenth century, and the Matinnecock, under the sachems Suscaneman and Tackapousha, do appear to have developed rather tenuous coalitions as a result of their contact with the English settlers.”

“An early example of [European] intervention into Native American political institutions is a 1664 agreement wherein the East Hampton and Southampton officials appointed a sunk squaw named Quashawam to govern both the Shinnecock and the Montauk.”