WITH KAREN ORDAHL KUPPERMAN
Karen Ordahl Kupperman is a professor of history at New York
University. She is author of Indians and English: Facing Off
in North America and Roanoke: The Lost Colony.
How do the English view themselves and others at the beginning
of their colonial ventures to the New World?
England was a Protestant nation. They thought of themselves somewhat
grandiosely as THE leaders of the Protestant cause, God's true
religion in Europe. If you go back to the Reformation and Protestantism,
these are people whose whole self-identification is built around
this notion that they are God's agents, that they are part of
the great plan for the culmination of history.
And so certainly they were ethnocentric.
There is a lot of talk among scholars about Europeans views of
the Other. And I think the Other for most English people would
have been preeminently the Turk. For some reason the Turk becomes
the embodiment of everything that is foreign and different from
us. Whatever the Turk is, we are the opposite is how the English
would have seen it. But also I think the Spanish, especially what
they saw as aggressive Spanish Catholicism, was a kind of Other
for the English, probably a much more powerful kind of Other than
the way we would construe racial or ethnic Others. Their opponents
in these great world historical dramas are the Other as far as
they are concerned.
English people in general expected to be
able to tell a lot about a person by what that person wore. You
could tell if a woman was married or unmarried by the way she
wore her hair. You could tell often even which part of the country
someone was from by their clothes. Certainly you could distinguish
their rank. The Sumptuary Laws meant that you had to be of a certain
rank to wear certain kinds of ornamentation. And punishments were
pretty severe if you tried to countervene those laws.
idea was that your presentation to the world should tell the truth
about your status, who you were, what rank you were, what you
did, where you came from, and people expected clothes to do all
The English in the Elizabethan period try to bring
Ireland under control and they do it very much the same way that
they will eventually do it in America, that is, by conquest but
also by sending over settlers. They write about the Irish in a
very contemptuous way. In fact, they use words and phrases that
they wouldn't use of the Indians. The Irish are not just savage,
they are stubborn savages. The Irish are people who have been
repeatedly offered this superior civility that the English are
purveying and the Irish have rejected it. And so there is a real
brutality in the wars to subdue the Irish.
A lot of the people
who went to the early colonies had been in Ireland and so it is
not so much that a kind of abstract lesson is drawn but it is
simply the same people carrying out similar policies in America.
How did the English view the Indians they encountered?
say that the English looked upon the Indians with high esteem.
I think the respect that the English felt for the Indians was
the respect of fear. They were very conscious of the fact that
the Indians lived well in an environment that they found absolutely
baffling. They felt vulnerable all the time. So they respected
the Indians. They thought of the Indian leaders, people like Powhatan,
as awe-inspiring leaders.
But at the same time they also thought
of them as savages, they thought of them as people who needed
to be brought into civility. I think they looked upon the Indians
as formidable. Formidable is the word I think I would chose.
Indians were organized in tribes, sometimes at village levels,
sometimes collections of villages. The English called Powhatan
'The Great Emperor Powhatan' as he was the overlord of more than
30 tribes in the Chesapeake at the time that Jamestown was founded.
An emperor is a king who rules over other kings. And who has no
one over him. And that was an exact description of what they perceived:
Powhatan was a great ruler who had many rulers at the village
level under him and therefore he was an emperor in English terms.
they have a lot of respect for people like Powhatan, which also
reflected their understanding that Powhatan could at any time
wipe them out if he so chose. So it is respect based in part at
least on fear and vulnerability.
Did the English view the Indians as a separate 'race'?
Color is not a determining characteristic
in this period. In the first place, the English don't think of
the Indians as being of a different color. Every account that
talks about color says that the Indians are born white, and that
they artificially darken their skin in one way or another.
Indians darken their skin either using walnut juice or some other
kind of substance or by becoming tanned by going outside in the
sunshine, because they have reason for wanting to be darker. But
anybody who talks about color in the early days says emphatically
that the Indians are naturally white.
So they think of the Indians
as being culturally different. But with respect to terms that
we today might use to talk about race or color, the English think
of them as being similar to themselves.
In fact one of the
most interesting question for the English was, What Old World
people are the Indians descended from? And they looked for known
diasporas in the ancient world that might have resulted in the
Indians coming to America. Such as the diaspora of the ten lost
tribes of Israel. Many people thought the Indians might be descended
from them. Some people thought they were Trojan descendants -
there were various hypotheses. But every English person who wrote
about it assumed that the Indians came from some known Old World
What does the story of Pocahontas tell us about English ideas
of race and difference?
When John Rolfe, who had developed
the tobacco crop, wanted to marry Pocahontas, he wrote a long
letter to the governor of the Jamestown colony talking about his
feelings for Pocahantas and he was very concerned that even though
she had been converted to Christianity, there are some prohibitions
in the Bible against marrying heathens and marrying into heathens'
lineages. But his letter never talks about her in what we would
consider to be racial terms. It is entirely religious categories.
and John Rolfe then had a son Thomas, and they went to England.
She would have been 20 at the time. They were received at Court.
She was an immediate sensation. A portrait of her, an engraving,
was rushed into print. And everywhere they went they caused a
flurry of interest.
They went to a masque at Court, one of these
great pageants, and she was a media sensation in England - it
was quite an event. I think it says a lot about the lack of racial
thinking, because the fact that Pocahontas was the daughter of
a king was the most important fact about her, not that she's an
Indian. That is a very graphic illustration of the fact that the
English did not yet think in racial terms. Status and religion
were more important. Pocahontas was received so well in London
because she was royalty and she was received as royalty.
some people even argued at the time that Rolfe was actually marrying
above himself. Because even though he was from an old and distinguished
family in England, he was not of a rank sufficient to marry a
king's daughter and that this marriage was inappropriate for that
How did the Indians view the English?
Well, all we
know is what the English wrote down. There is no written source
from an Indian hand in this early period in North America. And
the English try very hard often to transmit what the Indians are
telling them. But it is very hard for us to answer the question
I think a man like Powhatan was very experienced
with Europeans by the time Jamestown was founded. There had actually
been a Potawatomi man who had spent almost a decade travelling
with the Spanish in Spain, Havana, Mexico City and then had returned
to the Potawatomi people so they knew a lot about Europe and Europeans
and how they operate. And it seems pretty clear to me that Powhatan
thought it would be useful to have the English there.
at Jamestown and he see a little over a hundred people, all men,
not very competent, but they are the source of European manufactured
goods. There are certain kinds of tools in particular, particularly
metal tools that can hold an edge, that the Indians wanted. And
I think Powhatan thought that it would be convenient to have these
people here as a source of trade goods. He never dreamed that
he wouldn't be able to control them.
And so Powhatan allows
Jamestown's early settlement. He sort of specifies what land they
can settle on and to some extent allows them to have a pretty
steady food supply in the early years.
I have often wondered
if Powhatan could have seen the thousands of people who would
be coming to Virginia ten years after the straggling little colony
of Jamestown was first founded, what his initial response would
I mean he could easily have vanquished the Jamestown
settlers in the beginning by wiping them out. Or in fact all he
has to do is move away and withdraw the source of food that they
are dependent on, and that does it for Jamestown.
What else distinguishes the Indians from the English?
I think one of the
most important differences between the English and the Algonquins
- all of the Indians that the English encountered in the early
years were Algonquins - had to do with issues of ownership. English
people owned property and owned land and they expected part of
the payoff for taking this huge risk of coming to America was
to get land of their own.
And that was not a concept that the
Indians followed. I mean each village owned land. Individual Indians
didn't take a plot and say, "This is mine, and I will farm it
So the Indians expected to use a wide
range of resources over a fairly extensive land base, and I think
a lot of the clashes in the early years continuing through the
colonial period really came over questions of land use. Because
the European way of using land prevented the Indians from using
land in the way that they had always done. I think that is one
of the biggest cultural differences.
What cultural characteristics of the settlers exacerbated
the conflict with the Indians?
men in this period, particularly those of higher rank, believed
that you could never allow yourself to be vulnerable. That if
you were vulnerable you invited treachery, and that if you were
the victim of treachery you had made yourself vulnerable and it
was your own fault. I think that conditions a lot of the early
actions in the colonies, particularly ones that are exclusively
male, as Roanoke and Jamestown both were in the early days. Because
they are extremely vulnerable - they can't cope, they can't feed
themselves, they are living in constant fear. They are not really
So they come with this knowledge of
their own vulnerability. And their way of coping with that, since
to be vulnerable is to invite treachery, I think, is to always
act as though they are invulnerable, to act as though they are
the stronger party even though they are not.
So you see, for
example, Captain John Smith seizes a child when he goes into a
village, and holds the child hostage. The English tend to overreact
for every wrong, real or imagined, that they think has been done
The worst example that I know of is in Roanoke, the first
colony. When they arrive their ship promptly runs aground on the
Outer Banks of Carolina. They don't realize how shallow the ocean
around the Outer Banks actually is. So the ship that carried all
of their food supplies, "The Tiger," ran aground. All of their
food was spoiled except for about ten days worth of grain.
decided they will stay anyway. The men who are going to stay in
Roanoke set about building a rudimentary settlement. It is already
well into the summer by this time so there is no chance for them
to plant food or anything like that.
And while these men are
building this settlement, the sailors with Sir Richard Grenville,
commander of the expedition, go exploring in the Sound between
the Outer Banks and the coast of Carolina. They discovered one
day that a silver cup was missing from their luggage that they
were carrying around and they decided that it had been stolen
at the Indian village that they had visited two days previously.
So they went back to that village and burned it to the ground.
first sight you would think that this was an act of madness. When
you are about to leave 100 men with no food, it was already late
in the summer, alienating the Indians would seem to be the least
reasonable course of action. But I think from the standpoint of
someone like Grenville, it was the only thing he could do because
he saw it as a challenge. And if he had allowed a challenge to
go unpunished then he would have been showing that he was weak
and he would have been inviting all kinds of treachery.
I think this is the mind set of English men, especially the gentry,
coming to America. You always have to put on a show of your strength
and power, especially if you are extremely weak and vulnerable,
and that is what Grenville was doing in that case.
We often hear that the Indians thought the Europeans were
English people say that the Indians think of us as gods. But clearly
the Indians were very, very aware of the limits of English power
and capability. I think there is no evidence that any English
person was conceived of as a god. Most of those accounts come
from people writing about the encounter who are actually a generation
or so removed.
Thomas Hariot, though, says that the Indians
thought we were risen spirits, dead people who have returned to
this life. And that's because these Old World diseases are just
ripping through Indian populations, but the Europeans don't get
them and so one of the questions always is why is this happening?
Why is God choosing to visit disease on these people and not on
the Europeans? And I think both Indians and Europeans by and large
believed that nothing in the universe happens without God's will.
So this has to represent some kind of judgement of God.
English don't settle in North America until after a century of
contact. So the Indian population figures that the English cite
are already of very, very much reduced populations. Some historians
estimate that as many as 90% of the Indians died during the first
century of sustained contact, and there are epidemics that Europeans
describe where they say not one in ten is left alive.
epidemics didn't hit every region, or they hit different regions
at different times, but these diseases skew everything. You can't
really talk about anything about the encounter without understanding
that this is the most fundamental problem.
And so Hariot says
that the way the Roanokes explained the English resistance to
disease was that they were risen spirits. And in Jamestown, Captain
John Smith was interviewing a captive who came from the Piedmont
region, who actually was from a Sioux speaking tribe, and he asked
him, "Who do you think we are?" And this captive said, "We think
you are a people come from under the world to take our world from
us." A very poignant statement. Hariot and others talked about
Indian beliefs that when people die they go into another world.
And they live a complete life in this other world, and when they
die in that world they then come back into this world and live
another life in this world. So it is a kind of cyclical alternation
between these two worlds.
So I think what Hariot is describing
is that they think the English are dead people who have in fact
returned into this life. This is part of a natural process. It
doesn't mean that you are some kind of special supernatural being;
it just means that you are at a different stage in this process.
How do the Indians think of themselves?
We don't actually
know very much about how Indians thought of themselves but there
is one story that I think is quite revealing, in the writings
of Roger Williams up in New England.
Williams is one of the
very few people who really knew an Indian language well. And he
said that the Indians didn't have any word for `Indian' before
the English came because they didn't need one, because there was
no categorical difference. They had words for each other in terms
of a tribal name or village name, and then they had a word for
the whole human race - people.
And he said that they had started
calling themselves `Indians' when they had a need for such a word,
to distinguish themselves from Europeans. They used the word Indian
because it was a convenient word to use.
Which I think is a
sort of illustration of how for everybody involved in these early
relationships the categories are still being invented, both the
categories by which we talk about other people but also the categories
by which we talk about ourselves.
What motivated the early English colonization ventures?
The English overseas ventures
of trade and colonization were all organized by joint stock companies.
People came together to form these sort of rudimentary corporations.
They tended to be very short term - some of them like the Virginia
Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, were very long term -
but mostly a corporation would be formed for a single voyage and
the affairs of the corporation would be wound up at the at the
end of that voyage.
There was no limited liability then. These
were very high risk ventures. Any one investor could be held responsible
for the debts of the whole company. England has to do it this
way; England can't have government-sponsored colonization because
the country is simply too poor to do that.
What it means is
that the English ventures are always under pressure to make a
profit. We talk today about how companies are always looking to
the next quarterly report, but that is true with a vengeance in
these early corporations because the affairs are going to be wound
up at the end of this voyage or venture. And so, short-term thinking
tends to pervade these things. They are much more interested in
immediate profits and of course they don't get immediate profits
out of American ventures. Or out of many kinds of ventures.
stakes were extremely high. I mean they are gambling, essentially
gambling everything. They have no idea really what is going to
happen to them once they get to America, and of course the voyage
itself is pretty miserable. I mean, there are no cabins or anything.
People just have a blanket that they roll up in wherever they
can find a space, and if it is stormy and everybody is under the
deck and the bilge water is going back and forth and it is probably
full of all kinds of waste. It is almost inconceivable I think
to imagine what it must have been like in those ships.
What do the English colonial ventures find once they get to
North America didn't have much to offer the English. The model
was Spain in South America and Mexico which had found gold and
silver and other precious commodities. In the far north similarly
the French had formed this relationship with native groups in
the fur trade and furs were very valuable, feeding the luxury
trade for beaver hats, for felt hats.
But the English were
late on the scene and they had to take what was left, and what
was left was the east coast of North America. And there were no
So that is one of the reasons why the English
colonies stumbled around for the first decade or so until John
Rolfe, who ultimately married Pocahontas, experimented with tobacco
seeds, probably seeds that he had picked up in Bermuda, and found
a tobacco that would grow in Virginia in its relatively short
growing season but would be acceptable to the European tastes,
that would sell in Europe.
Once tobacco is in place it becomes
the gold of Virginia. But it has to be grown by an Old World labor
source. It is not a product that the English can acquire through
trade with the Indians [like the French fur traders] which would
have been their first choice.
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