A Tale Both Old and New: Jamestown at 400

Virginia's Jamestown 2007 agency has promoted the quadricentennial of Jamestown as "America's Anniversary" and embraced a goal of "showcas[ing] Virginia's unique role as the birthplace of modern America and the cradle of American democratic traditions, cultures, ideologies and principles." Most scholars of American Indian Studies and of early American history and culture are likely to ask whether we can or should describe the arrival of a small band of disputatious leaders and often inept colonists in the Chesapeake Bay as the advent of a modern democracy, especially considering the bloody history of those first few decades of colonization. A quick perusal of Jamestown 2007's Web site shows that organizers have complicated the triumphal rhetoric surrounding the quadricentennial by sponsoring such "Signature Events" as an "American Indian Intertribal Festival," an academic panel on the "African American Imprint on America," and a "Forum on the Future of Democracy." Even as the space shuttle Atlantis carried Jamestown mementoes on a recent trip to the International Space Station, more earthbound observers of the anniversary have reminded us that the Jamestown project spurred decades of violent warfare between Anglo colonists and Indian peoples and saw the arrival of captive Africans in 1619.¹

Publishers have responded to the Jamestown anniversary with a long list of titles, six of which I will review here.² These volumes, like this year's events in Virginia, weave a complex tale both old and new. David A. Price, James Horn, and Karen Ordahl Kupperman identify Jamestown as a turning point for the British colonial project and as a point of origin for the United States of America. Such claims are not new and have never been made without controversy: beginning in the nineteenth century, the veneration of Jamestown—more specifically, the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith—was forwarded by southerners as a corrective to the Yankee insistence that the United States was built upon Plymouth Rock. Paula Gunn Allen, Camilla Townsend, and Helen C. Rountree explicitly revisit the Jamestown experience from the standpoint of the Powhatan people. However cutting edge this emphasis on the Indian perspective may seem, the power of the Jamestown story has been tied to the fascinating involvement of American Indians—especially Wahunsenacawh (a.k.a. Powhatan) and Matoaka (a.k.a. Pocahontas)—ever since Captain John Smith's first publication on the colony in 1608.

The two approaches in these four-hundredth-anniversary volumes do not establish either of the "cockeyed, anachronistic, and overblown" narratives Jill Lepore identifies in other Jamestown anniversary books: the colony as either the source of the "American dream" or the "American nightmare." Authors attempting to reconstruct a seventeenth-century Powhatan viewpoint are nonetheless concerned with revising rather than erasing the description of Jamestown as an American point of origin. And those who analyze the innovations and eventual success of the colony call attention to the contributions of American Indians and of indentured Anglos and Africans. As Queen Elizabeth II noted during her May visit to Virginia, in 2007 we are able to "reflect more candidly on the Jamestown legacy."³

Allen, Townsend, and Rountree all attempt to capture a Powhatan perspective in their works...