Intimate Enemies: Mapping Native Politics in the Early Colonial Southeast

The planners of the Roanoke colony planned to lean heavily on two captured Indians, Manteo and Wanchese, to guide and translate for the vulnerable colonists. But when the two returned to America with the colonists in 1585, Manteo convinced the Croatan Indians to fight alongside the English while Wanchese led two separate Roanoke Indian expeditions against the colonists. Other similarly ambivalent stories of native cooperation and resistance to colonies raise troubling questions for the history of colonization. Why did some natives promote colonization while others resisted, and how critical was native cooperation for colonial survival?

Colonization has traditionally been presented as a relationship in which imperialists imposed colonization and colonized people either adapted or resisted. Similarly, variations in colonial experiences have been explained largely through reference to European colonial methods, with little attention paid to variation amongst the specific colonized populations. But this approach insists on an oppositional model of colonization that ignores the abundant evidence of willing native participation alongside fierce resistance. It has failed to look deeply into why natives might welcome colonies and whether colonies could benefit indigenous as well as colonial elites. And it has emphasized European preparedness and strategy in determining the failure, success, and long-term shape of colonies to the exclusion of native influence.

My dissertation will test the influence that native power had over European colonies at the dawn of the colonial project in North America. It proposes first that a close examination of intra-Indian relations—complex networks of alliance, rivalry, and exchange—can help explain how Indians chose to interact with colonies. Using a combination of European textual documents and archaeological and anthropological evidence, the project will attempt to reconstruct the native political context enmeshing early Spanish, French, and English attempts to build permanent colonies in the American southeast from 1564-1614. It will then look for evidence of European interest in and accommodation of native political ambitions as well as native attunement to European goals. Finally, it will evaluate whether a successful adaptation to native politics corresponded to colonies’ ability to thrive, and whether judicious management of contact with Europeans could enable native polities to dominate their traditional rivals.

For the AHA conference, I will present a poster that suggests both an approach to the problems inherent in Native American history and presents some of my preliminary findings on one of my case studies, the Roanoke colony. Focusing on my proposition that reconstructing native networks of alliance, rivalry, and exchange can help explain native behavior, the poster will demonstrate how historians can use a combination of contemporary maps, descriptive textual sources, and archaeological evidence to delineate native polities and their relationships in the vicinity of Roanoke. It will then show how this data can be mapped using GIS software and correlated with other geographic datasets, including waterways, patterns of arable land, and geological resources. Finally, the poster will overlay these two types of data in hopes of suggesting new ways to use technology to reinterpret intra-Native relationships in light of geostrategic considerations.