Dan David Foundation · 2026 · Prize ceremony & online publication

On Andrew Lipman, and a hunt neither side could manage alone.

A three-minute tribute on a historian of the early American coast, and on the forty years of failed colonial whaling that ended only when Long Island settlers began working with their Montaukett, Corchaug and Shinnecock neighbours.

The subject

Andrew Lipman is a Professor of History at Barnard College and a historian of early America and the Atlantic world. His first book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2015), won the Bancroft Prize in American History. His second, Squanto: A Native Odyssey (Yale University Press, 2024), won the PROSE Award in Biography. His work is about the sea: how Native and European people met, competed and worked on the water, and how the coast itself shaped colonial America.

The Dan David Prize selection committee lauded “Lipman for his imaginative approach to the history of the early Americas, and noted the way he navigates profound archival silences to recover Indigenous voices through a unique blend of creative biography and environmental history.”

Historical illustration comparing a Native canoe and a colonial plank-built whaleboat — **Native canoe and colonial whaleboat.** Two hull traditions on the same water. The English and Dutch arrived with iron harpoons and wide, plank-built boats with effective oars. Native seafarers of the Northeast coast brought something the newcomers did not have: the knowledge of how to use them.

Film still: two silhouetted crews in boats side by side on stylised blue water — **Two crews, one hunt.** We put the boats side by side and gave neither the foreground. The film’s whole argument is in that composition: American shore whaling was not a colonial invention that used Native muscle, but the joint creation of two overlapping maritime societies.

The aim drafted — for Daniella’s review

For roughly forty years, colonists in the Northeast tried to start a shore whaling industry and failed. The Dutch set up a station in Delaware Bay in 1634 and struck seventeen whales in four months — ten of which swam away. English ventures in Connecticut and on Long Island declared their intent to hunt and produced no oil at all. Then, in the late 1660s, Long Islanders suddenly began filling barrels. What changed was that they started working with their Montaukett, Corchaug and Shinnecock neighbours.

The reason is not sentimental, and the film is careful about that. The sea hunt required knowledge of migration routes and feeding grounds, the patience to wait for a whale to surface, the confidence to launch a small boat through surf, the ability to find land without instruments, and the endurance to row a carcass home. Every one of those was a traditional strength for Native seafarers and a point of weakness for European mariners. The film’s aim was to show skill, not folklore — which is also why we did not put anyone on a whale’s back.

Historical print of shore whaling: a whale beached and being processed on the sand — **Shore whaling, worked from the beach.** The industry was run from the shoreline: crews launched through the surf, and the carcass was hauled back to the sand to be cut up and the blubber rendered for export.

Film still: Native and colonial figures working together around a whale on the beach, with fires and barrels — **The beach, at work.** Fires, barrels, boats drawn up, and both communities working the same carcass. We kept the figures small and the labour large, because the labour is the evidence.

Historical map showing the northeastern American coast with whaling detail — **The coast, as the colonists mapped it.** A record of the shoreline as the newcomers understood it — and a reminder of how much of what mattered at sea never made it onto their charts.

Film still: a canoe crew crossing a stylised map with a compass rose — **Navigating what the map does not hold.** The crew moves across the map rather than along it. Knowing migration patterns and finding land in fog were not chart knowledge; they were carried by the people the charts leave out.

How the film is made

Each year the Foundation selects its winners and, with the help of the laureate, chooses the subject of the film they are being honored for. The Foundation’s team, who know that work intimately, help bring it to the page, and we turn it into script, image, register, and motion.

The one thing we keep from them is the film itself. It is made in their honor but held back, so that the first time Andrew Lipman meets it, in animated form, is the evening of the prize — the very moment they are being celebrated for the work it depicts. That is the part of the project we love: a film that is also a gift, a surprise, revealed in the room where it does its work.

Where the films travel

The Dan David films don’t end their life on the evening of the prize. After the ceremony they travel to YouTube and to the Foundation’s own website, where each one sits alongside the committee’s reasoning for choosing the laureate and further material on the research. The winners are interviewed once the films are public, and those interviews are woven into the published versions.

You care about your subject.
So do we.

Let’s talk →

Credits

Client: Dan David Foundation
Subject: Prof. Andrew Lipman, Barnard College
Direction: Daniella Koffler
Animation: Moofa Animation Team
Year: 2026

← All work Start a conversation →