UTOPIA, THE BRONX.(Co-op City)

If you take I-95 North through the Bronx heading out of the city, Co-op City will be on your right. Its high-rise apartment buildings stand far enough from one another so that each appears distinct and impressive against the sky. In slow-motion seconds, they pass like the measureless underside of a starship in a science-fiction movie. Drivers who don't live there are soon across the line into Westchester County and thinking of something else. Co-op City is the largest cooperative housing complex in America, possibly in the world. Its residential buildings have more than seventy thousand rooms. No one can say the exact total right offhand. The number of its apartments, however, is as established and immutable as the atomic weight of lead. That number is fifteen thousand three hundred and seventy-two. Co-op City's fifteen thousand three hundred and seventy-two apartments, at full occupancy, house more than sixty thousand people. If Co-op City weren't part of New York City, it would be the tenth-largest municipality in the state.

Co-op City sits mostly on marshland that was filled in--not very successfully, as it turned out--in 1966. Some of its acreage remains tidal flat along the Hutchinson River. At one time, this land and much of the eastern shore of the Bronx was inhabited by the Siwanoy tribe of Indians. Al Shapiro, a retired facilities engineer for the Post Office, who has lived in Co-op City for twentyseven years and served as president or vice-president of the cooperative's board of directors for ten, says he would like to find some Siwanoy Indians and get them to open a casino at Co-op City. Then, he says, he would bargain for concessions from local gambling moguls like Donald Trump. Al Shapiro is only kidding; the Siwanoy are no more.

They were an Algonquian tribe, of the same linguistic family as the Menominee of Wisconsin, the Chippewa of the Plains, and the Cree of Canada. That fact about the Siwanoy is fairly certain, but others are less so, including whether they were called the Siwanoy and whether they constituted a tribe or something less defined. Indians did live in the Bronx, and historians did call them the Siwanoy; who they were is a question mark today. Archeological studies of village sites in the Bronx show that Indians had been in the area for several hundred years before the coming of the Dutch, in 1614. Middens that the Indians left behind hold evidence of their rich and varied diet--whitetail-deer bones, lobster and crab claws, quahog and mussel and conch shells, elk bones, charred walnuts, hickory shells, and deep, ancient heaps of oyster shells. Pottery found in the middens revealed an improvement in the Siwanoy's skills as potters dating from about 1550, with finely wrought and decorated pots of square-neck design. Historians don't know why the pottery improved. One guess is that new pottery styles were brought to the Siwanoy by women whom they captured, or by captured Siwanoy women who later escaped or were redeemed.

When the land here was swamp, a likely site for a shellfishing camp was on a granite outcropping at the corner of Baychester Avenue and Donizetti Place in Co-op City. Too much trouble to dynamite and cart off, the outcropping is still there, beside the busy intersection, bracketed by two Dumpster pads. A better documented Indian village site is about a five-minute drive south, past Co-op City, at the corner of Schley and Clarence Avenues. A creek, no sign of which now remains, used to come into Eastchester Bay there. Shoreline curving to a point encloses a perfect little cove with high ground above it that keeps nor'easters off your neck. Among the many bays, inlets, and coves that corrugate the eastern edge of the Bronx, the cove at the corner of Schley and Clarence is especially snug. Indians used this site seasonally, when they were collecting shellfish. Some of the shell heaps here were as deep as five feet.

In 1918, an archeologist named Alanson Skinner did a study of this site, digging carefully through the middens and the ground around them. Along with shells, animal bones, and potsherds, he found six human skeletons, including one of an infant. Artifacts like stone gorgets, fishing-net sinkers, and tools for hammering were just lying on the shore. Dug-up objects like lead bullets, bottle glass, gun flints, fragments of white clay trade pipes, and a brass arrowpoint probably cut from the side of a worn-out kettle indicated habitation in the years after trading with the Dutch had begun. In a small cache, Skinner found a collection of periwinkle-shell parts ready to be worked and smoothed into wampum beads.

The ground he excavated is now mostly covered with houses. A jetty extends the point, and on the other side of it somebody is building a marina and condominiums. The house at 3236 Schley Avenue, adjoining the point, has a side yard with a small mound in its lawn--a shell heap, perhaps. I couldn't ask, though, because 3236 appeared to be vacant. A short distance up the street are row houses. I knocked on the door at 3232 Schley, and a woman in a red sweatshirt and short bobbed hair answered. She was talking on a cordless phone and replied to me between sentences spoken into it. I asked if the row houses were new; they were. I asked what had been there before and the woman said, "An empty lot." That an Indian village had once occupied the site was news to her.

The Siwanoy also raised crops, which they planted in scattered plots on higher ground. Animals belonging to the Dutch got into the crops of many local Indians; the Indians naturally killed and ate the animals; ergo, eventually, war. In 1640, under a cruel governor, the Dutch started a widespread wiping out of Indians. A Dutch history says that sixteen hundred Indians were massacred on this governor's orders between 1643 and 1644 alone. (An exaggerated estimate, and unfair to the governor, some historians say.) For their part, the Indians descended upon and massacred unprotected settlements of Dutch. A halfhearted treaty in 1643 interrupted the killing, briefly.