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The arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 1607, and the regular contact they initiated with the peoples of the Potomac the following year, marked the intersection of two previously separate historical trajectories and the meeting of two significantly different environmental sensibilities. Contrary to stereotype, however, regular contact between the Potomac nations and English colonists did not immediately transform life along the river. Quite the opposite: compared to the tumultuous fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, the first half of the seventeenth century brought relatively few major changes to the Native peoples of the Potomac. They were spared for the moment the epidemics that laid waste to other Native American populations in this same period, and they mostly kept their ancestral lands: as late as 1650 all but two of the river’s Native groups remained rooted in the same soil that had sustained them in 1607.Nor did the fundamentals of the Potomac nations’ subsistence practices, social structure, cosmology, and political culture undergo any major changes. Some nations were even able to exploit the English presence for conservative purposes, to roll back the clock by using the newcomers to regain their independence from Powhatan or the tayac.1 In fact, life was harder and more tumultuous for colonists in the first half of the seventeenth century than it was for the Native peoples of the Potomac. Far from destroying the environment and laying waste to indigenous populations , the English struggled to survive in their new environment. Few in number and wracked by disease and internal conflicts, colonists along the Potomac were forced to find their niche within Native American networks of trade and diplomacy that had been established well before their arrival. No less than the Algonquians , English colonists sought a place within these indigenous diplomatic and exchange networks in order to survive in a world of expansionist paramount chiefs and northern Iroquoian raiders. c h a p t e r ฀ f o u r The Nature of Colonization ., 72 Nature and History in the Potomac Country The English ecological imagination also meshed surprisingly well with that of the Potomac Algonquians, even though the English brought to the Potomac very different ideas about the proper relationships between humans and nature. One could read some of these differences in the landscapes they had created. On the one hand, Potomac villagers aimed at dietary diversification within each village or hamlet and traded outside the immediate vicinity mainly for culturally significant goods such as shell beads and copper; thus each local landscape roughly resembled that of every other settlement in the region. On the other hand, the English tended toward distinctive local specializations, producing surpluses of whatever could be best produced and marketed in each specific place, and thus they created a wide variety of landscapes that were linked together by a long-distance trade in virtually everything under the sun. This made it possible for Englishmen to imagine such wildly different places as London, rural Ulster, and the lower Potomac as part of the landscape of greater Britain. Other distinctive features of the English ecological imagination were worked out during the sixteenth-century reconquest of Ireland: many of the men involved in the colonization of Virginia had fought in the savage campaigns of the Nine Years War (1594–1603), in which English officers developed a comprehensive form of ecological warfare specifically intended for people regarded as“natural”or“wild” and thus lacking cultivation and civility. Surprisingly, it was the very differences between the ecological imaginations and historical trajectories of Natives and newcomers that fostered a half-century of coexistence between the Potomac nations and English colonists at Jamestown and (after 1634) in the new colony of Maryland. Although one prominent historian has asserted that colonial encounters in early America demanded a “choice . . . between two different ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem,” on the Potomac circumstances did not immediately force that choice.2 There were more than two ways of living here, because the region’s long-term environmental history had produced a complex economic and diplomatic configuration in which the arrival of the English meant something different to each werowance and his people. No two nations’ interests, geographies, or histories were alike; consequently, their responses to the English presence were strikingly varied and fluid. Thus some Native groups were willing to trade with and ally themselves with the English, while others were not (or were willing but on different terms). Nor were Europeans a monolithic, single-minded group...

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