Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America

311 Pages·2000·12.337 MB·English

by  Karen Ordahl Kupperman

Indians and English

Indians and English
Facing Off in Early America
Karen Ordahl Kupperman
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2000 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing
from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press,
Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2000 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2000
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl
Indians and English : facing off in early America / Karen Ordahl Kupperman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8014-3178-6 (cloth) — ISBN 0-8014-8282-8 (paper)
i. Indians of North America—First contact with Europeans. 2. Indians of North
America—Public opinion. 3. Indians of North America—History—Colonial period,
ca. 1600-1775. 4. America—Discovery and exploration—English. 5. America—
Foreign public opinion, British. 6. United States—History—Colonial period, ca.
1600-1775. I. Title.
E59.F53K86 2000
973.2—dc2i 99-052767
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Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface ix
Introduction i
i Mirror Images 16
2 Reading Indian Bodies 41
3 Indian Polities 77
4 The Names of God no
5 Village Life 142
6 Incorporating the Other 174
7 Resisting the Other 212
Notes 241
Index 291

Illustrations
New England Indians trade with Bartholomew Gosnold's party,
1602 8
Ole Worm's Cabinet of Curiosities 21
Pages from the Tradescant collection catalogue 24
Powhatan's mantle 26
Pomeiooc mother and daughter, painted by John White and engraved
by Theodore de Bry 44
Wingina's wife 57
Ancient British man and Pictish woman 60
Sir Walter Ralegh and his son Wat 65
Roanoke Indian leader 66
Wingina 67
Secoton woman 68
Southern Algonquian man and identifying marks 70
Captain John Smith's Map of Ould Virginia 99
Samuel de Champlain's Map of Port Fortuné, Cape Cod 101
Kiwasa, statue of Algonquian deity 123
Algonquian priest 126
The Flyer, Algonquian shaman 127
Carolina Algonquian mortuary 136
The village of Secoton 145
The village of Pomeiooc 146
Algonquian man and woman eating 163
viii Illustrations
Cooking in a pot over a fire 165
Canoe manufacture 167
Southern Algonquian fishing scene with weirs 169
Ralph Hamor's embassy to Powhatan 198
Pocahontas 201
Eiakintomino in London 202
Pocahontas being persuaded to board the English ship
before her capture 209
Engraving of the great attack of 1622 in Virginia 225
Engraving of the English attack on the Pequot fort at Mystic,
1637 231
Preface
This is a propitious moment to consider the confrontation between
American and European peoples at the time when North America was
being colonized. Scholarly work in many fields has produced new aware­
ness of how Europeans and Indians thought about their own societies
and about human nature, as well as understanding of the structures of
authority in those cultures. Scholars of early modern England have led
us to see the veil of historical lore through which venturers viewed the
world and how modes of self-presentation shaped relationships.
Archaeologists, particularly in very recent decades, have made possible
a more profound understanding of American life on the eve of coloniza­
tion, and have given us the basis for new comprehension of the early
English documents. And native people's maintenance of their own oral
tradition enhances our ability to interpret those documents. The dis­
cussions surrounding the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage
brought scholars from a wide variety of disciplines together and spurred
continuing exchange.
Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America, which began from
the same set of preoccupations as my first book, Settling With the
Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America,
1580-1640 (1980), takes up issues and approaches of which I was un­
aware twenty years ago. We now know a great deal more about the as­
sumptions of both Europeans and Americans, and specialists have
shown us how to understand topics ranging from how to read the pos­
ture in a portrait to the spectrum of meanings in a label such as "sub­
tle" or "politique." Not only does Indians and English: Facing Off in
Early America draw on the wealth of new scholarship on encounters,
X Preface
diasporas, and new and transformed early modern societies, it also at­
tempts to understand more fully the Indians' response to the new ele­
ments in their Eves and the changed circumstances within which they
maneuvered. The Americans' own knowledge is embedded in the early
English texts, especially those written by English observers who formed
close relationships with their neighbors, and over the intervening cen­
turies many Indian people have recorded their oral traditions about the
early period.
The key to understanding this early tentative period is, as far as pos­
sible, to sweep away our knowledge of the eventual outcome of the train
of events set in motion during it. Indians and English: Facing Off in
Early America seeks to recover the uncertainty and fear in which all
sides lived, as well as the genuine curiosity and sense of unimagined
possibilities with which groups of people approached each other. This
book, like its predecessor, is based on a firm commitment to intensive
reading of the early documents, and to recognizing the reality of the
human beings who created this history. Too often modern writers
"prove" their arguments with telling quotes, and often the best quotes
come from writers with little or no direct experience of Indian life.
Those who stayed home could be much more definite in their judg­
ments than the confused and self-contradictory writings of those who
struggled to make some sense of their manifold observations and expe­
riences. English who actually spent time with Americans and tried to
understand what American associates told them about their history, re­
ligious beliefs, and cultural practices exhibited a range of responses—
within a single brief book writers could be contemptuous and admir­
ing, hostile and friendly, self-confident and terrified—and it is the scope
and complexity of these reactions that this book seeks to elucidate.
Achieving such comprehension requires seeking to understand English
culture of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as well as the
cultures of the eastern Algonquians. Both are foreign to us, and we can­
not understand the true import of the words the writers used to describe
themselves and the Americans without immersing ourselves in recent
work in English history.
One goal of Settling With the Indians was to demonstrate the broad
agreement among eyewitness English writers about the essential hu­
manity and high level of organization among the Indians at the time of
colonization. Therefore that book provides missive documentation of
English writing on the coastal North American Àlgonquians at the time
when colonization began. Each claim the book makes about English
views is documented by reference to every instance of the appearance