Conflict, Crisis, and Violence in the Virginia Coastal Lands
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REDUCTIVE RIPPLES IN THE NEW WORLD: CONFLICT, CRISIS, AND VIOLENCE IN THE VIRGINIA COASTAL LANDS A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS IN HISTORY MAY 2016 By Mark D. Shoberg Thesis Committee: Richard Rath, Chairperson Suzanna Reiss Marcus Daniel Keywords: Violent Transformation, Reduction, Reducción, Algonquians, Roanoke, Jamestown, Ajacán, Powhatan, Don Luis, Scarcity, Accumulation Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1 Argument ......................................................................................................... 2 Reductivism ..................................................................................................... 4 Ambivalence .................................................................................................... 6 Reducción......................................................................................................... 7 Scarcity ............................................................................................................ 9 Mapping ......................................................................................................... 10 Christian Religious Ideologies ....................................................................... 12 Structure of Thesis ......................................................................................... 14 o Don Luis and the Jesuit Murders ........................................................ 16 o The Roanoke Colony and the Silver Cup ............................................ 18 o Algonquian Prophecies and the Starving Time ................................... 20 The Algonquian Powhatans ........................................................................... 23 o Mantoac and Powhatan Religious Ideologies ..................................... 25 o Algonquian Warfare ............................................................................ 29 Genocide ........................................................................................................ 30 Chapter 1: Don Luis and the Jesuit Murders ..................................................... 31 Chapter 2: Roanoke and the Silver Cup .............................................................. 78 Chapter 3: Algonquian Prophecies and the Starving Time ............................. 143 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 176 Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 185 Shoberg 1 Introduction In less than two days, during the spring of 1571, Algonquian Indians vanquished the Spanish near their tiny settlement in Ajacán. The Powhatans used the axes the Europeans refused to trade in exchange for foodstuffs against them. Only one Spanish boy survived to tell the story. Thirteen years later, the English, hoping to build a military outpost to attack Spanish ships laden with American treasure, met with the inhabitants of Roanoke and determined the island would become the home to England’s first permanent American colony. In 1585, the English returned to Roanoke. Within the year, the Europeans razed a village and set fire to an Indian communities’ maize on account of a silver chalice they believed the “savages” stole from them. Conditions between the indigenous, mainland communities and the starving Europeans continued to deteriorate until rumors of an Indian war prompted the English to preemptively attack the Algonquian Secotans. Numerous Secotans died in the attacks, and the battle ended violently when an Irish man, Edward Nugent, chopped off the head of Pemisapan, the Secotans’ werowance. The English then temporarily abandoned the island, along with hundreds of Caribbean slaves. Those African and Indian slaves were the first “lost people” of Roanoke. The English returned yet again in 1587 and left behind another 110 colonists. This second batch of colonists disappeared as well, but it now appears that they may have moved north and settled among the Algonquian Chesapeakes, east of the Powhatans’ paramount chiefdom. Sometime between 1600 and 1607 — the dates are still undetermined — the Powhatans exterminated the entire Chesapeake nation. It was a singular event that was extraordinarily violent and entirely uncommon for Algonquian Indians living along the Virginian coastlands previous to European contact. The Powhatans later explained to the English that they needed to Shoberg 2 totally eradicate “all of the [Chesapeake] inhabitants” because their priests prophesied that “ancient enemies” from the Chesapeake Bay threatened to not only attack them, but “dissolve them and give end to their empire.” The Chesapeakes bore the brunt of the prophecy, but it was ultimately the English and their European policies that undermined Powhatan lifeways in the New World. This thesis argues that Spanish and English colonists brought ideologies to the New World that created a series of crises in the Virginian coastal lands where Algonquian Indians made their home. There was not one crisis that occurred at one time with one people. Rather, there were several crises that occurred as Europeans moved west into Algonquian territory in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The reasons for the conflicts and violence vary from situation to situation, but this thesis examines the roles that reductive, colonial policies based in accumulation and the demands of the marketplace; extractionism — taking value from an environment or people and leaving them and their environment with less value; scarcity; and religion played in exacerbating the crises that followed early interactions between Europeans “Strangers” and Algonquian “Real People.”1 To begin, this thesis examines three, European, colonial case studies: the Spanish at Ajacán; the English at Roanoke; and the English at Jamestown. It is not enough, however, to focus merely on crises Europeans created as they interacted with Eastern Woodland Algonquians in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. To understand the magnitude and reach of European ideologies based in reductive logic — which I explain shortly — and how those ideologies may have impacted Algonquians living along the Atlantic coastal lands, indigenous 1 Helen Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 5-6. Since Europeans invaded Algonquian lands, this thesis uses the terms Stranger and Real People throughout the text. Also, I follow Randolph Turner and Helen Rountree’s lead, as both use Algonquian and Powhatan interchangeably when “applied to all the Algonquian-speaking Indians of the coastal plain of Virginia.” Shoberg 3 violence and conflicts between disparate Indian nations must also be examined. On one hand, this thesis draws a fine line between Indian agency and ritualized indigenous violence that was a normative feature of indigenes at the time, and on the other, I analyze the impact of newly emerging European ideologies based in unequivocal transformation tied to the emerging globalized marketplace. Such ideologies were not inert; rather, they were iterative and carried to the New World by those who hoped to change it. The words “unequivocal transformation” does not mean that the process of reductivism was predetermined in any way or that it would necessarily replace indigenous, economic ways based in reciprocity and tribute. Historically speaking, it did no such thing. Furthermore, I do not argue that reductive ideologies underpinned by change would always result in inevitable violence. Although Europeans arrived in the New World hoping to transform it, the colonists, adventurers, artists, scientists, soldiers, and chroniclers of history exhibited ongoing ambivalence over their actions, whereby numerous instances of contingency and conflict occurred that did not necessarily result in violence. The reason reductivism may appear at times as deterministic was simply because it was a structural system rather than a purely contingent one. Walter Hixson cites Patrick Wolfe in American Settler Colonialism to explain the inherent violence of European colonialism; he writes, “The colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” Hixson follows this sentiment and relates that “Because it was structural rather than contingent,” the system of violence outlasted colonialism and went much farther beyond it.2 Lastly, there was always room for transformation that did not include violent change, but it should surprise no one that such instances, when they did occur through diplomacy, accommodation, assimilation, or the withdrawal of Algonquians or Europeans from Algonquian spaces, they were the exception rather than the rule. 2 Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4-5. Shoberg 4 At this point, the logic of transformation and ideologies based in reduction needs explaining. Reductivism was not specifically a process that physically reduced people or the environment from one thing into another. Reductivism goes far beyond that narrow scope of physical change. Reductivism pertains to the discourse of change specifically rooted in economics tied to the demands of the marketplace and change