Native Americans discovered Europe at
the same time Europeans discovered America. As far as we
know, no birch bark canoes caught the gulf stream to Glasgow
(although dozens of individual people did make the trip on
European vessels, voluntarily or involuntarily), and no Native
American conquistadores planted flags at Florence, but just
as Europeans struggled to fit evidence of “new worlds” into
their frames of understanding, so too did Native North Americans
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
A story recorded by French Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune
in 1633 suggests how the process worked. According to Le
Jeune, an Innu (Montagnais) man whose people lived near the
mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence
…has told us that his grandmother used to
take pleasure in relating to him the astonishment of
the Natives, when they saw for the first time a French ship
arrived upon their shores. They thought it was a moving
Island; they did not know what to say of the great sails
which made it go; their astonishment was redoubled in seeing
a number of men on deck. The women at once began to prepare
houses for them, as is their custom when new guests arrive,
and four canoes of Natives ventured to board these vessels.
They invited the Frenchmen to come into the houses which
had been made ready for them, but neither side understood
the other. They were given a barrel of bread or biscuit.
Having brought it on shore they examined it; and finding no
taste in it, threw it into the water. . . . [The Innu] said
the Frenchmen drank blood and ate wood, thus naming the wine and the biscuits.
Now as they were unable to understand to what nation our
people belonged, they gave them the name which has since
always clung to the French, ouemichtigouchiou; that is to
say, a man who works in wood, or who is in a canoe or vessel of wood.1
The story probably conflates several historical events
and casts them metaphorically rather than literally.
Yet it nicely summarizes the process of discovery as
at least some seventeenth century Native people understood
it: initial puzzlement led to a guarded welcome, an exchange
of goods, and the bestowal of a name.
There is nothing puzzling about the puzzlement, but why
should the mysterious arrival of beings from a floating
island require the women of the story “to prepare houses
for them, as is their custom when new guests arrive”? For
the Innu, as for most eastern Native Americans, a vast range
of “persons” comprised the universe, and only a small
minority were humans like us; most were what anthropologists
call “other-than-human persons.” These included such elemental
forces as the sun, the rain, the four winds, and the earth
itself, along with animals, plants, streams, mountains, and any
number of other actors. Such persons could affect humans’ lives
in a variety of visible and invisible ways. The results could be
good or ill, or, better put, either advantageous or disadvantageous—not
so much because other-than-human persons were inherently good or
evil but simply because they were persons who had their own purposes
and who might or might not find themselves obligated to work with
others. Thus the sun might either encourage other-than-human food
plants to grow, or burn them out. Those plants in turn might bear
fruit that human persons could eat, or refuse to do so. Similarly,
deer and other animals might voluntarily give themselves up to be
eaten, or make themselves scarce.
Blurring the line between such clearly other-than-human
persons and human persons were, in endless cultural variety,
gods with complicated personalities, ancestral progenitors who
descended from the sky or emerged from the earth, and culture
heroes or trickster figures who might intervene in history at
any time. Another kind of blurring involved persons whose
languages, customs, or behavior differed markedly from one’s
own. The distinction is implied by the word Innu, which—like
Anishinaabeg (used in the upper Great Lakes region), Lenape
(in the Delaware Valley), and similar terms in countless Native
languages—roughly translates as “human beings” or “real people,”
and applied only to those within the circle of kin and other
relationships that defined the boundaries of a tribal community.
Whatever the case, human persons had to ally themselves with
both human and, especially, other-than-human persons to channel
their power in productive ways.
Europeans assumed a role similar to that of those other-than-human
persons in this complex world, hence the welcome prepared by the
women in Le Jeune’s story. Whoever the persons who arrived on the
floating island were, it was far preferable to ally with them than
to risk their hostility or, perhaps worse, their making common cause
with one’s enemies. Alliances were supposed to be marked by reciprocity,
by exchanges of goods, labor, or other mutually advantageous benefits.
Such transactions were seldom perfectly symmetrical; instead they left
subordinates obligated to chiefs, elders, and powerful other-than-human
persons who provided more than could be immediately returned. Often these
relationships of unbalanced reciprocity were symbolized by particular
material artifacts, gifts that physically demonstrated connections and
obligations. Chiefs, for instance, distributed rare shell beads or other
items of adornment to their followers, items that they in turn had received
from other chiefs and that thus demonstrated far-flung powerful alliances.
Rare items whose barely understood origins lay hundreds of miles away—shells,
minerals, and especially copper—seem to have been considered gifts from, and
thus signs of alliance with, powerful other-than-human persons who lived
underground or underwater. Whatever the case, exchanges of goods were signs
of alliance among persons; lack of such exchange was a sign of enmity.
Thus, the curious things the European newcomers brought were central
to the story that Le Jeune heard. The people in the story rejected
the gift of inedible sea biscuits; hard as rocks after a long voyage,
they must indeed have seemed to be blocks of wood. Meanwhile, the
story deems the wine intended to wash the biscuit down not just tasteless
but vile. “Frenchmen drank blood and ate wood,” observed the storyteller
(who, by the way, was familiar enough with the Le Jeune’s religion to know
about the Roman Catholic Eucharist and its associations with bread, wine, and blood).
Such gifts were not exactly designed to seal a firm alliance.
Nonetheless, the Frenchmen received a name, which placed them
in the universe of persons and made them comprehensible as a
sort of human persons: “ouemichtigouchiou; that is to say, a
man who works in wood, or who is in a canoe or vessel of wood.”
Throughout eastern North America, Native people assigned Europeans
similar identities, derived from technology and exotic material
goods. In southern New England, according to Roger Williams, Native
people called the English “Cháuquaquock, that is, Knive-men.”
In the Mohawk country of today’s upstate New York, Europeans in
general were known as; asseroni or “axe-makers,” and Dutch people
in particular as kristoni, which means “I am a metal maker.”
In what the English called “Virginia” and what its Native inhabitants
called Tsenacommacah (the densely peopled land), Tassantasses, or
“strangers”, was the preferred label, yet a song sung by warriors
referred to the Jamestown colonists’ first leader, Christopher
Newport, as “Captain Newport [who] brought them Copper.”2
Copper, axes, knives, cloth, and the technologies that produced
them were the most important aspect of Native peoples’ discovery
of Europe, and the most important reason that Native leaders persistently
sought alliances with Europeans, untrustworthy as those who
ate wood and blood might be. Copper kettles, iron cutting implements,
woolen textiles, and other articles from a world new to Americans
soon proved their superiority to earthenware pottery, stone tools,
and fur robes.
Perhaps more importantly, arrowheads fashioned from
scrap copper and, later, firearms purchased from traders spawned
Native American arms races that required people to ally with Europeans
or succumb to those with access to superior weapons. It is little wonder
then, that rumors of the marvels to be had in exchange for beaver pelts
and other furs apparently preceded the axe-makers wherever they went;
a constant theme in European accounts of first explorations of bays and
rivers is the appearance of canoe-loads of people waving beaver pelts
they desired to trade. “The Beaver does everything perfectly well,”
a Native man explained to Le Jeune. “It makes kettles, hatchets, swords,
knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything.”3
The beaver, the deerskin, the corn, or whatever else could be traded for
European goods could also increase the political power of Native leaders
and their communities in a system where exotic material goods embodied the
strength that came from alliance with their source. Two stories, one from
what the French called Canada and the other from Tsenacommacah (present day
Virginia), provide some insight into the dynamics at work. In 1636, an Algonquin
chief announced to a group of Wendats (Hurons) who were reluctant to join him
in a military campaign “that his body was hatchets; he meant that the preservation
of his person and of his Nation was the preservation of the hatchets, the
kettles, and all the trade of the French, for the Hurons.” Indeed, he claimed
that he was so much “master of the French” that he could make them “all recross
the sea.”4 Europeans made the hatchets, but the power flowed through him.
A quarter-century earlier, Powhatan, paramount chief of Tsennacommacah,
had repeatedly expressed a similar idea. One example among many comes from
1614, shortly after Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas had married Englishman
John Rolfe. Virginia Governor Thomas Dale dispatched colonist Ralph Hamor
to try to convince Powhatan to give another daughter to the English. The
Native leader refused. Among his many complaints was that gifts Hamor had
brought him—“two large pieces of copper, five strings of white and blue beads,
five wooden combs, ten fish-hooks, and a pair of knives”—were “not so ample . . . as
formerly Captaine Newport”4 had given him. To clarify what he expected,
Powhatan “caused to be fetched a great glass of sack, some three quarts
or better, which Captain Newport had given him six or seven years since,
carefully preserved by him, not much above a pint in all this time spent.”
To each of the Englishmen in Hamor’s party he dispensed “in a great oyster
shell some three spoonfuls” of the fortifed wine and then instructed Hamor to tell Dale
…to send him these particular, Ten pieces of copper,
a shaving knife, an iron frow to cleave boards, a grinding
stone, not so big but four or five men may carry it, which
would be big enough for his use, two bone combs . . . , an
hundred fish-hooks or if he could spare it, rather a fishing
seine, and a cat, and a dog.
Powhatan insisted that Hamor repeat each item and, the Englishman
said, “yet still doubtful that I might forget any of them, he bade
me write them down in such a Table book as he showed me, which was
a very fair one.” Like the bottle of sack and like the axes the
later Algonquin chief compared himself to, possession of the
blank notebook (which might or might not have come from Newport
and which Hamor was not allowed to mark) ratified the Powhatan’s
power over the English in the eyes of his Native allies and
rivals. “He told me,” said Hamor, “it did him much good to show
it to strangers which came unto him.”5
For at least two reasons, these displays of power lasted little
longer than the first generation of discovery. Europeans quickly
saturated the market with their goods. Once substantial numbers of
Europeans arrived in any given region, it quickly became impossible
for a single chief to control access to goods now sold by the barrel
to all comers. As early as January 1608—only a few months after
the establishment of Jamestown—John Smith complained that ordinary
colonists and visiting sailors were trading so much copper to
ordinary Indians that corn and furs “could not be had for a pound
of copper, which before was sold for an ounce.” The threat that
such wide-scale democratic trade presented to Native political
structures helps explain the long list of exotica Powhatan sought
to extract from Hamor to demonstrate his power; mere copper and
axes no longer served the purpose.
Yet a far greater threat to Native political structures—indeed,
to the entire fabric of Native communities—came from an aspect of
the discovery of Europe that no chief, and no colonist, could control.
Before communities could fully assimilate their discovery of
Europeans and their goods, viral diseases that the newcomers
inadvertently brought with them swept through Native America. Smallpox
was the greatest of these killers, but measles, mumps, chicken pox,
and influenzas in their ever-evolving forms were nearly as deadly.
Bubonic plague and hemorrhagic fevers similar to Ebola might also
have been part of the gruesome mix.
As early as 1585, at Roanoke on the Outer Banks of today’s North
Carolina, English colonists reported that Native “people began to
die very fast, and many in short space” after the English colonists
visited their villages. “In some towns about twenty, in some forty,
in some sixty, and in one six score” perished6. Similarly, in 1616 a
French missionary said that the Native people of Acadia “often complain
that, since the French mingle with and carry on trade with them, they
are dying fast, and the population is thinning out.”7 A year later, what
one English colonist described as “a great mortality” struck both
Jamestown and Powhatan’s people; its impact was “far greater among the
Indians,”8 who endured repeated bouts over a three-year stretch. There is
no direct evidence, but Powhatan himself, who died in 1618, may have been
one of the victims. During the same period, an unidentified ailment struck
much of the coast of New England. Perhaps the worst episode of all occurred
between 1633 and 1641, when a pandemic of smallpox struck New England, the
St. Lawrence Valley, the Great Lakes region, and the continental interior
at least as far south as Chesapeake Bay and as far west as the Appalachians.
A Dutch chronicler was likely not exaggerating when he wrote in 1650 that “the
Indians . . . affirm, that before the arrival of the Christians, and before the
small pox broke out amongst them, they were ten times as numerous as they now are.”9
Le Jeune heard the Innu story about the first arrival of the French in
1633 on the eve of the great smallpox epidemic. The image of persons
who “drank blood and ate wood” thus takes on a prophetic tone.
For Native people, the discovery of Europe was a discovery of death on
an unimaginable scale and of a struggle for cultural survival that continues to this day.
1Thwaites, Reuben Gold , ed. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. Cleveland, 1896-1901, 5:119-121. In all quotations, spelling and punctuation has been modernized.
2Strachey, William, Wright, Lewis and Freund, Virginia, eds. The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612). London: The Hakluyt Society, 1953, 85-86.
3Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, 6: 295-297.
4Ibid., 10:75.
5Hamor, Raphe. A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia, and the Success of the Affaires There till the 18 of June, 1614. London, 1615, 41-45.
6Hariot, Thomas. A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Frankfort-am-Main, 1590, 24-30.
7Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, 3:103.
8Quoted in Roundtree, Helen C. Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990, 64.
9Adrian van der Donck, Jeremiah Johnson, trans.Description of the Conflict and Commerce: The Founding of New Netherland. New York: New York Historical Society Collections, 2d ser., 1 (1841): 183.
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