by William Cocke

Living here in North Carolina, I hear a lot about Cherokee Indians, but what about other Native Americans? And what really happened when the first Europeans arrived?
-Sam McCall, Cullowhee, N.C.

It’s perhaps inevitable for conquerors to have the luxury of writing history books, but North America’s story doesn’t begin with European contact. When Christopher Columbus first spied Hispaniola, Hernando de Soto gazed upon the Great Smoky Mountains, and John Smith founded the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, these accomplishments were firsts only from our Euro-centric perspective. Likewise, when we claim that so-and-so discovered this native plant, described this mountain, or explored this river, we ignore the fact that, for the original Americans, these and other natural features and resources had names, purposes, and cultural significance. Long before the New World became an obsession of the Old, native peoples lived and dreamed the place that would eventually become America.

Aboriginal wanderers crossed into North America from Siberia about 12,000 years ago, making the scant 400 years or so of European habitation seem a tad inconsequential in comparison. They began arriving in the eastern mountains, woodlands, and coastal plains not long after spreading through Canada and the Great Plains. This long period of dispersal and settlement is divided into four cultural stages: Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and Historic. Each of these periods is marked by its own set of overlapping conditions and the middle two are generally broken down into early, middle, and late sub-periods. Contact with Europeans had commenced by the twilight of the Woodland period and rapidly dominated the Historic period, which lasted from 1607-1750.

The Woodland stage, stretching from 2,000 B.C.-1600 A.D., is characterized by five major developments: clay pottery, growing regional trade networks, the practice of agriculture, the introduction of the bow and arrow, and the burial of dead in mounds. There are thousands of burial mounds in Virginia; in perhaps the first instance of scientific archaeology in the state, Thomas Jefferson excavated one in Albemarle County, earning a right to the title, Father of Virginia Archaeology. Other mounds, all located in southwest Virginia, show influences of the great mound-building cultures of the Mississippi Valley. The Mississippian influence-powerful warlike tribes with elaborate social hierarchies-was felt most strongly in Georgia and Tennessee, but their reach also extended into North Carolina.

Near present-day Asheville, on the grounds of Biltmore Estate, archeologists have excavated a well-preserved mound from the middle Woodland period. This particular mound appears to have served as the foundation for a council house, a large wooden structure that served as a meeting place, a social and spiritual nexus for the whole community. The mound happens to lie right at the intersection of two major trails –one rising from the lowcountry of South Carolina west through Tennessee and Kentucky and onto southern Ohio, the other arching down from southwest Virginia and through the North Carolina piedmont into the mountains. Archaeologists believe that the Connestee Indians lived here and that they were precursors of the Cherokee Nation. No one knows what happened to the Connestees.

During the Woodland period, settlements became permanent villages, families coalesced into tribal units, and the foundations for the complex and sophisticated American Indian societies encountered by the first Englishmen were solidified. In Virginia, the first settlers came into contact with an Algonquian-speaking empire along the coastal plain known as Powhatan (Indian groups are identified linguistically) as well as the Iroquoian-speaking Nottoway and Meherrin tribes. The piedmont tribes consisted of a Siouan confederacy that included the Monacan and Mannahoac peoples. The Great Valley and mountain regions were largely uninhabited. In North Carolina, colonists found Algonquian-speaking tribes along the coast, and inland, Siouan, Iroquoian, and Muskogean speakers, including the Catawba, Creek, and Cherokee Indians.

Surprisingly, warfare played but a minor role in the Eastern American Indians’ decline. For some time after contact, a flourishing fur trade kept Indian tribes relatively prosperous and smoothed relations with settlers. Unfortunately, when land became more valuable than deer or beaver pelts, the less numerous Indians were unable to withstand the tide of people washing over them. Disease further weakened the tribes. Within a few decades of contact, most of the original tribes had splintered, disintegrated, or simply vanished. By 1800 most of their unwritten languages were dead (a notable exception today is Cherokee, standardized into an alphabet by Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah).

Of course, we all know the sad story of the post-1600 Historic period resulting from the clash of two cultures utterly alien to each other. It is tempting, but ultimately futile, to speculate on how Indian societies might have developed if contact had come a few centuries later. Could a Mayan or Aztec-like civilization developed? Who knows? Suffice it to say that the original inhabitants of Virginia seem to have been doing quite well, thank you, before the arrival of Capt. John Smith & Co. And tribes such as the Cherokees had already attained a remarkable level of sophistication, with a sense of cohesion that exists today. Their tale may be the saddest of all-through treaty and trust, they were perhaps the most successful tribe in assimilating to the new order of things. Their ultimate payback was the forced march to Oklahoma in 1838 known as the Trail of Tears, one of the most shameful episodes in American history.

The most obvious American Indian legacies live on in place names, roads and trails that follow ancient footpaths, even towns and cities built in the same spots chosen by hunters long ago. In Shenandoah National Park, Big Meadows was originally cleared by Indian fire and long sections of the Appalachian Trail shadow an old Indian path along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

As we prepare to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in 2007, some Virginia tribes are refusing to participate in the ceremonies. At issue is a bill wending its way through the U.S. Senate that would grant full federal recognition to six of Virginia’s eight state-recognized tribes (the Lumbee tribe in North Carolina is simultaneously pursing similar legislation). Currently, conditions for passage appear favorable as the tribes (Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Nansemond, and Monacan Indian Nation) insist they want the housing, education, and health care benefits such legislation would provide, rather than using it as an opportunity to build casinos. Let’s hope that the people who lived here for nearly 450 generations before the Jamestown settlers receive their recognition and decide to participate. It will be a much poorer celebration without them.

Charlottesville’s William Cocke is always turning over rocks and rotten logs to see what’s underneath. As a young Boy Scout, he learned that cedar bark makes good tinder and four-of-a-kind beats a full house. He also remembers the Camp-o-ree where he had to kill a live chicken and cook it for dinner. He was not traumatized in the least and has no plans to sue. He can be reached at wtc4q@virginia.edu.