Public domain image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Archaeology.org’s news feed once again provides us with a link to a most interesting article.
Scott Dawson of NC claims descent from the Croatoan people, a Native American tribe popularly believed to have destroyed the first English settlement in North America – the Lost Colony of Roanoke.
The popularly known version of the story goes something like this: after a number of English journeys to the New World made by sailors and soldiers, in 1587 a group of colonists, including women and children, traveled there to establish the first permanent settlement. They ended up at Roanoke, a small island off the coast of North Carolina. The first person of English descent to be born in the New World was born there – her name was Virginia Dare. After conflicts with the local tribes and/or other difficulties, the leader of the settlement, John White, returned to English to seek aid for the colony. Returning to Roanoke three years later, he found the settlement completely abandoned and destroyed, and the word “Croatoan” etched into a tree.
So far as I am aware, next to nothing is known about the Croatoan people. They are villainized in most retellings of the Roanoke story, as they are blamed for the destruction of the settlement.
But Scott Dawson has another idea. Based on archaeological findings and other research (not just by himself, but relying on research by established and respected scholars), he believes that the English colonists may have moved to a Croatoan village and assimilated into their society, in order to escape the predations of the other native tribe on the island – the Secotan.
If this were the case, it might help explain why the word “Croatoan” was etched into the tree. This is a part of the story which has always bugged me. Sure, it’s possible that someone might have carved this word into the tree as a note to whomever was to find it of who killed them all, but that seems awfully melodramatic. Of course, the word could have been carved into the tree weeks or months or years earlier, as the English settlers attempted to communicate with the natives, and decided that for lack of quill and parchment, they would carve the word into the tree, as they sounded out how to spell what the natives called themselves (or what they called the place). But, in the absence of any other evidence, given that nearly everything about this is speculation, does it not seem equally likely that the colonists could have written this word on the tree as a sign that they had gone to, and joined up with, the Croatoan?
Dawson makes the excellent point that, in today’s post-colonial world, we should be researching the Croatoan people just as we seek to learn more about the colonists. For too long, his people have been portrayed as pure villains, and no efforts have been made (or at least no sympathetic efforts) to understand them or to know more about them. On the other hand, the narrative he proposes villainizes the Secotan, and I don’t see him proposing that we need to understand and sympathize with them…
In any case, it will be interesting to see how this develops, and if we can ever solve the mystery of the Lost Colony, one of the great mysteries of American history.
I’ve always been interested in this particular story, so I’m looking forward to seeing what else Dawson has to say about it. Like you wrote, to research the colonists and ignore the Croatoans and other tribes in the area would be foolish–a borderlands is precisely that because of the interaction between multiple cultures/peoples in one area.
And yet, from the point of view of American history, or English or European history of settlement, it has always made perfect sense to focus exclusively on the colonists.
Of course, in our new, post-colonial approach to all things, it is only to be expected that we would take a different perspective on things, and regard both populations equally as objects of study.
But it does still feel somewhat radical, does it not?
I was at an America-Japan Society conference for Japanese grad students in American Studies, and the keynote speaker gave an amazing speech about how people in American studies/literature studies in the US need to learn a second language to be able to read and study the criticism from other countries. (She researches Mark Twain and has looked at how the French, Spanish-speakers, and Japanese have examined his work in translation).
On one hand, duh. On the other, this is quite radical in the field. I would love to know more about how the Japanese in American studies write about our culture, for one.
As for Roanoke and studying the native population, have you ever read Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, 1991) or Brett Walker’s Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800? Both authors really help shift the focus from just settlers to what kind of environment the settlers and the native peoples actually lived in together. Still waiting for that to trickle down into mainstream historical thought, but the idea has been growing in academic circles.
That’s a great Brett Walker essay. I’ve been reading a fair bit about the Ainu recently, as a sort of parallel or contrast to my research on Ryukyu… I do quite enjoy that article.
As for the idea of looking at scholarship in another language to look back at American Studies from the outside, yeah, “duh”, but in a way it’s only obvious once one has broken through the web of discourse and made that realization. It seems so obvious, so standard, to not even think of looking at materials in other languages, until one actually does think about it.