Caliban's Own Voice: American Indian Views of the Other in Colonial Virginia

Abstract

AS SCHOLARS HAVE LONG NOTED, European perceptions of American Indians in the colonial era were filtered through the preexisting image of the medieval man.' In spite of, and often because of, the drawings of those whose specific task was to record these newly found people, images of American Indians held on for centuries to elements of the medieval mythological creature so important to the European imagination.2 The wild man and the American Indian personified the other, providing a synchronic and evolutionary image with which Europeans defined themselves in opposition.3 It is the side of that cultural mirror that I wish to explore in this paper. That is, in what manner did American Indians perceive Europeans? Did American Indians have a category of the other and, if so, did the European colonists personify that category? Anthropological and historical studies of colonialism make clear that the actions of indigenous people on first contact with Europeans require an understanding of indigenous history and mythology.4 Just as Europeans encountered Indians and cast them in terms of previously held myths, so too did Indians react in their encounter with Europeans. In this paper I will attempt to characterize American Indian perceptions of Europeans, and European images of Indians, drawn from within the same colonial context. I will do this in the specifics of one particular place and time in the European colonization of the American continent-the Jamestown colony in Virginia, around 1607. This time and place is by no means the beginning of European colonization for the Virginia Indians.5 Yet it is a pertinent place and time for the study I propose for two reasons. First, it is here that we have the earliest literature written with a specific eye towards ethnographic detail on the Virginia Indians. Although there is a rich and extant literature from two earlier (and failed) colonization efforts, it is the writing of the Jamestown ethnographers that