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I have been thinking and writing about Roanoke for more than a decade, but it was not until the summer of  that I decided to write a book about the native peoples who first encountered Sir Walter Ralegh’s colonists and, in the end, determined their fate. Numerous books on the attempts to plant an English settlement at Roanoke Island exist, some written for a popular audience and some more scholarly in tone, but none of them, to my mind, adequately place the Algonquian peoples of the Carolina Outer Banks—a region the native peoples called Ossomocomuck—at the center of the story. This seems to me a shame, and a missed opportunity, for Roanoke always has struck me as much more a Native American than an Anglo-American story. This book is at heart the story of the killing of one Indian leader, a long time ago, along the North Carolina coast, and the consequences of that violent act. It is a story based on numerous assumptions. The evidence remaining from Ralegh’s Roanoke ventures is surprisingly rich, but even a close reading of the surviving documents, reports, and narratives leaves the historian of the region’s Algonquian people trying to fill in many blanks. In writing about the killing of an Indian, and its consequences, I have felt compelled to speculate, to imagine how the native peoples of Ossomocomuck understood the changes that English settlement produced. Writing this book has forced me to think about what it is we can know about the Native American past, and how far the historian can and should go in his or her effort to reconstruct and imagine a history that is recorded only in fragments in the documents on which all of us rely.   Writing this book also has allowed me to reflect on the meaning of historical events. Like many historians, I suspect, I have at times asked my students to explain the significance of this or that person, place, or thing on their examinations. Ralegh’s ventures and the story of the Lost Colonists are almost always described briefly in the textbooks publishers produce for high school and college students, but the murder and beheading of the Indian leader with whom these English settlers interacted goes without mention, even though it surely affected the lives of his people and, I suggest in the pages that follow, Sir Walter’s dream of establishing an AngloAmerican empire. We make choices about the stories we want to tell, and in this book I have tried to turn a familiar tale around, and examine how Indians on the Carolina Outer Banks understood the significance of a number of small but critical events in a fashion very different from the English writers who recorded them. So many people helped me sort out and think through the issues raised in telling such a story as this. A long conversation with Mary Mapes provided me with insights that have informed this project in so many ways. Susan Ferentinos of the Organization of American Historians invited me to join her and two other scholars as part of a team tasked with offering the National Park Service suggestions on how to update and improve interpretive programs and the visitors’ experience at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. The time spent on Roanoke Island convinced me that a book placing native peoples at the center of the story was needed, and this project has benefited from the conversations I had with Susan and my two colleagues at Fort Raleigh, Lindley Butler and Tom Beaman. While on Roanoke Island I met Doug Stover, the National Park Service historian at the Fort Raleigh National Historic site. Doug and his immensely dedicated and talented colleagues showed me a side of Roanoke that I had not seen before, and I am sure this book is better for it. Numerous other friends and colleagues have helped in ways small and large. I am fortunate to teach in an extremely collegial and supportive history department at SUNY-Geneseo. David Tamarin, Kathy Mapes, Jordan Kleiman, Jim Williams, Bill Cook, Carol Faulkner, Meg Stolee, and Bill Gohlman all listened to my ideas, while Joe Cope offered suggestions on where to find answers to many of my questions about sixteenth-century England. Harriet Sleggs runs a truly outstanding interlibrary loan department at Geneseo’s Milne Library, making it possible for a historian living in Rochester to write about...

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