To the Point: Learning more about the 'first peoples' on American soil

To the Point: Learning more about the 'first peoples' on American soil

'Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians and Catholics in Early North America'

University Park, Pa. – To help recognize November as Native American Heritage Month, Penn State Live posed a few questions to A. Gregg Roeber, professor of early modern history and religious studies at Penn State and co-director of the Max Kade German-American Research Institute. In 2008 Roeber edited the book “Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians and Catholics in Early North America,” published by Penn State Press. It was inspired by an international conference the institute hosted on the occasion of the English translation and publication of the Diaries of David Ziesberger, one of the first Moravian German-speaking missionaries and ethnographic observers of the Lenape.

Roeber's book examines the diaries, letters and journals of early European missionaries settling in America who survived only because of the help of Native American groups. These writings are valuable resources for recovering information about the religions, cultures and political makeup of the “First Peoples.”

First of all, is the correct term to use "American Indian," "Native American" or something else?

Roeber: There’s no good answer to this question -- many American Indian groups have said they prefer that term; others do not. Some scholars have adopted “First Peoples” in recognition that no human group is really “native” to the Americas -- everyone is an immigrant.

How did the First Peoples save the early European settlers when they first arrived in America?

Roeber: Well, which Native Americans, and which Europeans? The story of contact between the Spanish and the peoples of the Caribbean is quite different from the much later story of the northern Europeans. If we include, as we should, the vanished Norse/Viking settlements that were pre-Columbian contacts, then both trade and showing Europeans how to survive in terms of food were important -- and that holds true pretty much across the board, no matter where exchanges took place. But it’s also true that allergies to foods and exposure to disease sometimes triggered some of the violence that marred the early contacts.

Why did it take so long for Americans to recognize the positive impact the First Peoples had on saving the lives of all those settlers?

Roeber: That was recognized at the time -- but in many instances, there were also misunderstandings and violent exchanges, and those incidents tended to obliterate the memories of the more positive exchanges. The recognition depends on where to look. To take but one example, early hopes in the Jamestown settlement were dashed in a general attack by the powerful Powhatan confederacy led by Opechancanough in 1622, and that led to an overwhelmingly negative view of First Peoples that didn’t really get reversed until around 1700, when some Euro-Americans lamented the fact that what might have been a promising alliance and mixture of peoples symbolized by Pocahontas’ marriage to John Rolfe never developed as it should have. Of course, by that time, the First Peoples of Virginia had largely been removed from the areas of European settlement.

The notion of the “inevitable” decline of these groups didn’t really start to get reversed until the mid-20th century. In part this came about because more serious scholarship determined that the unexpected impact of European disease strains had devastated populations far in excess of what most scholarship had been willing to admit. Once it became clear that the decline in the populations of First Peoples was due to patterns of contagion no one could have predicted or controlled, the “inevitable” decline notion became much harder to defend, and the positive exchanges more interesting and the subject of more serious inquiry.

What were the Native Americans' first impressions of the settlers and why do you think they were willing to help the Europeans?

Roeber: Good question -- curiosity for certain, but again it depends on where we look. It’s probably important to note that exchanges among the First Peoples themselves were not uniformly peaceful or positive, and figuring out whether a strange new group of humans constituted a threat or a promise of alliance was always risky. In North America, apparently the First Peoples who encountered the English on Roanoke Island were mostly positive. By contrast, Powhatan, when he encountered the Jamestown settlement in 1607, had already apparently just finished destroying the remnants of the Roanoke settlers who had re-settled along the James and from the outset thought the English an invading threat. In New England, disease had already decimated much of those populations when the so-called “Pilgrims” or “Brownists” arrived in 1620 -- but the much-weakened groups did seem to be willing to teach the English how to plant crops, fish and otherwise survive.

You noted in your book that more work needs to be done to appreciate the help the Native Americans gave the settlers. What can we do as a nation to give them the recognition and appreciation they deserve?

Roeber: I wouldn’t know about “as a nation,” but certainly there’s now a wealth of new research and information on the exchanges between not just Europeans and First Peoples but what’s also very important, the third arriving “root” of what makes up the American population, the Africans -- and incorporating this new knowledge we’re still uncovering in how we teach is surely one of the most important steps.

You wrote that we still have a lot to learn about Native Americans -- notably their cultures, religions and languages. How do you suggest we learn as much as we can from them and why?

Roeber: It’s probably important to emphasize that different groups of Native Americans live within, or separated from, the mainstream of contemporary life, so recognizing that there never was “one” Native American culture or people is a place to start when trying to understand the complexity of the many languages, cultures and regionally distinctive qualities of the First Peoples. There really are very good courses and resources in cultural anthropology, ethnography and history available for those who are interested.

What can their various religions teach us today?

Roeber: Since some of these cultures were hunter-gatherer, others fairly sedentary agricultural, still others urban; their religious views tended to reflect their relationship to the particular environment they inhabited. It’s important neither to romanticize those relationships (another way of marginalizing them) nor to overlook what wisdom they accumulated from long observation of climate, geography, flora and fauna. Some will undoubtedly find religious strains in those experiences; others will not.

Your book explores the interactions between Native Americans and two different groups of European settlers. Where were these records found?

Roeber: The major observations of the Moravians on their life among the Lenape are located in repositories both in North America and in Europe.The French Catholic records also can be found on both continents, and in both instances, there are still discoveries being made in the form of neglected documents or under-studied texts.

How do they compare to other records of European settlers' interactions with Native Americans? Are they more honest?

Roeber: I don’t think it’s a question of “honest” -- in the particular set of comparisons we were looking at, the French-Catholic exchanges with the First Peoples they encounter are among the richest we have for the Northeastern part of the continent. The Moravian records are among the most careful recording of actual customs, exchanges, worldviews we have for the Middle-Atlantic region, but the same can be said for new discoveries that are re-writing (for example) the European-African-First Peoples’ relationships in places like Yucatan.