Michael Leroy Oberg - The Head in Edward Nugents Hand: Roanokes Forgotten Indians

THE HEAD

HAND

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

DANIEL K. RICHTER AND KATHLEEN M. BROWN, SERIES EDITORS

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Michael Leroy Oberg

Copyright 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A cataloging-in-publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4031-3

ISBN-10: 0-8122-4031-6

FOR

In the end an Irish man serving me, one Nugent... undertooke him, and following him in the woods overtooke him, and I in some doubt least we had lost both the king, and my man by our own negligence to have been intercepted by the savages, we met him returning out of the woods with Pemisapans head in his hand.

GOVERNOR RALPH LANE

D rive onto Roanoke Island. Whether you take the bridge from Nags Head or come from the mainland by way of Manns Harbor, you will be greeted with a road sign bearing the same message. Roanoke Island, the sign reads, was the birthplace of Americas First English Child, 1587.

And so one story has been privileged and remembered above all others. It has been that way for a long time. North Carolinas Edward Graham Daves, the first president of the Roanoke Island Memorial Association, resented what he considered the unwarranted historical attention lavished on the English settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation to his north, the respective stomping grounds of flamboyant Cavaliers and stern Calvinists. So what if those colonization efforts produced permanent settlements? Daves argued in 1893 that the attempts at Roanoke and the birth of Virginia Dare were events of supreme importance in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race in America. On this island, Daves asserted, the seed was sown which was eventually to yield the richest harvest: the direct fruit of these efforts was the colony of Jamestown, and Raleigh is the real pioneer of American civilization. Another North Carolinian, O. R. Mangum, wrote in 1906 that to Roanoke Island belongs a unique honor for all ages to come. It was the birthplace of the first girl of English parents in America, for shortly after the arrival of the colonists Virginia Dare was born.

But what of the Indians who greeted these colonists and ultimately decided their fate? They were here first, but their stories were considered irrelevant by Daves, Mangum, and scores of other early historians. History and memory, it is clear, often walk hand in hand. Certain stories become part of the record. They are meaningful, significant, and resonant. They provide important answers to what we consider the important questions. They help us make sense of ourselves, or they educate or entertain us. Other stories we cast aside. They are uninteresting and trivial, it seems, so we forget them. We must be honest about this. We make choices about the stories we want to tell. We can continue to cast the story of Roanoke in mythic terms, if we choose, and view it as the opening act in the great drama of English colonization in America. This is what the Roanoke Island Memorial Association did when, in 1896, it erected a monument at the site of Fort Raleigh, on the northern tip of the island, commemorating the birth of Virginia Dare and the baptism of Englands first Christian Indian convert, Manteo. Or we can follow in the footsteps of the Memorial Associations successor, the Roanoke Island Historical Association, whose efforts to retrieve the islands past from historical oblivion culminated in the commissioning of the Lost Colony pageant and efforts to reconstruct a fort at what is now the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.

Efforts such as these can shape how we remember historical events and help define the record and the significance of the past. Many who know anything at all about Sir Walter Raleghs colonizing ventures, for instance, learn it from Paul Greens symphonic drama, The Lost Colony, staged at the Waterside Theater on the Fort Raleigh site for the first time in 1937 and, with a few exceptions, every summer since then. Green made his choices about the stories he wanted to tell. In the opening act, an announcer tells the audience, in case they do not already know, that we are gathered here this evening to honor the spiritual birthplace of our nation and to memorialize those heroic men and women who made it so. Ralegh and his circle of supporters, Greens announcer continues,

conceived the idea of building a new nation in the new world, and on this very site was laid the first foundation for it. Here these pioneers of a new order, of a new form of government, lived and struggled, suffered and died. And in the symbol of their endurance and their sacrifice let us renew our courage and our hope, and by doing so prove to ourselves and to the world that they did not die in vain. For as we keep faith with them, so shall we keep faith with ourselves and with future generations who demand of us that a nation of liberty and free men shall continue on the earth.

This was inspiring stuff at the time, and Greens audiences, viewing his play as the menace of totalitarianism and the fear of war tightened its grip on Europe, perhaps did not mind that he chose to depict the islands natives as benighted cretins, superstitious and violent, who utter their lines in monosyllabic Indian-speak. This was, after all, an American, and not an American Indian, drama.

The knowledgeable National Park Service rangers at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, just outside the theater where Paul Greens play is staged, still describe the Roanoke ventures as the first chapter in the story of how this continent came to be occupied by English-speaking peoples. We can tell this story, too, but we must remember that there is more than one way to look at the past.

We can, for instance, view Roanoke and the attempt to settle there not as a heroic beginning, but as an English failure and an Indian victory, even if the fruits of that victory were decidedly ambivalent. The story can be turned around, if we choose, and told from the Indians perspective. All too often, Indians, like those who greeted Raleghs colonists, have been viewed as part of the past, as noble relics doomed to extinction. This belief has informed much of the writing of American history, and it always has been part of the story of Roanoke. Walter Clark, for instance, who spoke at Roanoke Island in 1902, seemed to believe that all Indians had become extinct. Where the smoke of a lonely wigwam rose, Clark asserted, now the roar of great cities fills the ear and the blaze of electric lights reddens the sky.