Hello!

New York City was first built as a conurbation by the Dutch in the year 1626 as New Amsterdam, which then existed as a Dutch colony for almost 40 years before it was conquered by England in 1664 and renamed as New York City.

The inhabitants of the region by the time the Dutch arrived were called the Lenape (or the Delaware), who were present from the lower Hudson River Valley, through New York City, New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, and the Delaware River. Part of the issue in finding suitable reading related to pre-colonial history is that in some regions, there simply is not written history (or there exists very little available) about the region as first-hand accounts, and those which we do know might come from the colonists themselves. This is not inherently a bad thing, but it doesn't present the histories of those people firsthand, but from the point of view of those interacting with them.

I can however, recommend a handful of books about the Lenape People and Colonial Dutch New York. The list is as follows:

The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America by Jaap Jacobs

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America by Russell Shorto

A Description of New Netherland (The Iroquoians and Their World) by Adriaen van der Donck

Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn by Jean Soderlund

Peoples of the River Valleys: The Odyssey of the Delaware Indians by Amy Schutt

I hope those could be of some help!