Warren’s Heritage: Native American History-Part 5

In covering the Native American history of Virginia for this series we have consulted many sources, from long-published texts to new books, as well as relevant internet sites, and would like to take
this opportunity to share some of what we have found with you the reader.

To learn more about the Native Peoples of Virginia on the internet, we advise visiting one of the following sites: Virginia’s Indians, Past and Present , Virginia’s First People and the state government’s Virginia Council on Indians. These sites contain a wealth of good beginning and basic information on Native Virginians, and also have links to other sites of interest, including for all eight of Virginia’s state recognized tribes.

Books on Native Virginians are many in number, are excellent resources and can be found at public libraries or ordered through bookstores. In addition to the books that we will here mention, one can find numerous other accounts of the colonial settlement of Virginia in the 1600s that include drawings and information on Native peoples of the period. Considered some of the best and most accurate drawings depicting Native Algonquian peoples of the tidewater region are John White’s 1580s drawings (commonly seen in the form of their 1590 reproduction by Theodor de Bry). These drawings portray every aspect of Native life along the coast of North Carolina and Virginia, from village living patters to how dinner was served. “First People: The Early Indians of Virginia” by Keith Egloff and Deborah Woodward is an introduction to the history of Native peoples in Virginia as discovered through archaeology and original documents of explorers and colonists, and
has many drawings of Indian life and pictures of artifacts. “Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and their Predecessors” by Helen C. Rountree and E. Randolph Turner explores the history of the best known Native American group in the commonwealth’s history and one of the best known in US history, and is a well written, very accessible and quick read at under 240 pages.

To read on the conflicts developing between Native Virginians and the encroaching colonists, D.A. Tisdale’s “Soldiers of the Virginia Colony: 1607-1699” describes the fortifications, armament and tactics used by the colonists in their wars against the Indians, and in the process explains in good background detail what led to each of those conflicts. The “History of the Dividing Line” by William Byrd is a classic in the study of Virginia history, and includes descriptions by Byrd of the Native peoples and colonists he encounters. The book is a diary of his journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Blue Ridge Mountains while surveying the border between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728.

Two books about North Carolina help immensely in understanding the lives of Virginia’s Native peoples in the 1500s and 1600s, as the modern borders of our states had little bearing on the
geographic dispersion of native peoples, and the eastern woodlands subsistence strategies, religious worship, political and social mores and even clothing and hair styles among Virginia’s Native peoples were often shared with Native peoples from the Carolinas and Maryland. The first is John Lawson’s “A New Voyage to Carolina,” Lawson’s diary and descriptions of his travels through the coast and hinterlands of South Carolina and North Carolina in 1701, returning to the coast of North Carolina along a route paralleling the current state boundaries between North Carolina and Virginia. Describing the Native peoples along the way in fascinating and often entertaining detail, Lawson describes a moving scene at one point in Eno Town (an Occaneechi village near present-day Chapel Hill and Durham), where an elderly Indian asks Lawson to take his son with him to the English settlements and to teach him the English language and Christian religion. The old man tells Lawson that he himself is too old to change his way of life, culture and beliefs, but he sees that the future holds little for those of his people who maintain their traditional ways. This sad prophecy would come true for the Occaneechi and other Native peoples of North Carolina and Virginia soon enough; in Virginia during Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 and in the Carolinas during the Tuscarora War of 1711-1714.

Finally, Roanoke Island: The Beginnings of English America” by David Stick is a detailed yet easily readable account of the English colonization of Roanoke Island and the Albemarle Sound in what is today North Carolina but what in the 1580s was Virginia. English colonial relations with the local indigenous population is born here and continued at Jamestown which, had the Roanoke Island colony been successful, may not have been the first permanent English settlement in the New World. From this short book the reader is informed through original documents, diaries and accounts of the fact that the Roanoke colonists were aware of and even visited the Chesapeake Bay, and, probably more telling, that the Chesapeake Bay’s Native peoples were keenly aware of the colonists, their behavior and the potential threats they could pose. By the time Jamestown was finally planted, Native peoples of Virginia had been living with stories of, visits from and even attacks by Europeans for a century.