Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, Revised and Expanded Edition

Introduction

“Count the lying black marks of this one,”exclaimed Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter), paper in hand, as he detailed the hypocrisies and half-truths contained in a stack of letters the colonial governor of South Carolina had sent him. The Cherokee leader “kept them regularly piled in a bundle, according to the time he received them,” James Adair recalled, “and often shewed them to the traders, in order to expose their fine promising contents .” The Indian elder conceded that the earliest messages from Governor James Glen “contained a little truth,” according to Adair, “and he excused the failure” of the governor's subsequent letters on the ground that “much business might have perplexed him, so as to occasion him to forget complying with his strong promise.” But eventually Attakullakulla, like Adair himself, “repented of trusting to the governor’s promises” and admitted that his patience was exhausted. The governor's letters, he proclaimed, “were an heap of black broad papers, and ought to be burnt in the old years fire.”1 Adair’s scene presents two contrasting forms of evidence for understanding this distant time: written—and often misleading—European documents on the one hand and pointed—but rarely preserved—opinions of native Southeasterners on the other. Unfortunately, the heaps of black broad papers that now constitute our principal source for constructing interpretive narratives of the colonial past are seldom accompanied by the first-person Indian perspectives so essential to a balanced picture of the period. Keenly aware of this bias, the authors of the following five chapters have metaphorically invoked the purifying fires of the poskita (or “busk”) in their critical studies of documentary and archaeological evidence. They have revealed long-stilled native voices speaking to issues of political and economic interaction , the same realms that colonial agents and officials sought most eagerly to dominate. Amy Turner Bushnell discusses the dual political systems that functioned effectively for a century in Spanish Florida. Native leaders retained much of their authority at the village level, providing a basis for long-term stability. Introduction gregory a. waselkov    By means of a complex web of mutual obligations, sedentary Florida Indians managed to coexist relatively peacefully with Franciscan friars and secular Spanish colonists. This little-known experiment in Indian-European interaction deserves much more attention from ethnohistorians, who, as Bushnell correctly states, have generally regarded French and (especially) English colonization of the Southeast as “the central story.”2 As familiar as we are with the English colonial adventure in Virginia, the next two chapters contain some startling revelations on the Native American response to that invasion. By focusing on Cockacoeske, successor to Powhatan and Opechancanough, Martha McCartney explains in the third chapter of this section how the “Queen of Pamunkey” adroitly manipulated colonial treaty negotiations in an ingenious (though ultimately unsuccessful ) attempt to reestablish the dominance of her own people in a reconstituted Powhatan chiefdom. In the process, McCartney also provides us with a detailed biographical depiction of an Indian woman in the colonial era. Unfortunately, few Indian women were as frequently mentioned in colonial-era documents as Cockacoeske.3 McCartney’s portrait of Cockacoeske clearly indicates the weakness of chiefly authority that characterized Virginia’s Algonquian political scene in the late seventeenth century. How the chiefs’ influence declined is the subject of Stephen Potter’s essay, the second chapter in this section. Since the earliest historical sources describe nearly total control by the chiefs over the acquisition of prestige items, including newly available European trade goods, Potter looks at the changing distribution of these objects in graves to pinpoint the first signs of lessening chiefly authority. As the availability of formerly scarce, high-status items rapidly increased with an accelerating intercultural trade in corn and furs, trade goods were acquired by—and buried with—a broader cross section of Indian society. Because possession of these valued goods originally served to validate the chiefs’ claims to privileged rank, Potter argues, their gradual acquisition by other elements of the population mirrored the weakening authority of the chiefs.4 Copper, particularly in the form of gorgets (a type of pendant), served as a symbol of rank exclusively reserved for the Virginia Algonquian chiefs. When English-made buttons, bells, and other objects of copper and brass suddenly became available through trade, these too were incorporated directly into the traditional belief system, carrying a symbolic import similar part two, politics and economics  to those items produced locally...