Secotan

The Algonquian who lived in Secotan (or Secoton), a village near the coast of present-day North Carolina, attracted the attention of John White and Thomas Harriot, whose paintings and descriptions provide a valuable record of 16th-century Algonquian culture.

Secotan culture, like that of other Algonquian peoples in the region, appears to have been hierarchical. Harriot reported on the manners and dress of the “great lords,” “chief ladies,” and “priests” of the people. The people wore few clothes, usually little more than breechcloths or deerskin aprons or skirts, although they might also wear capes in cold weather. They decorated their bodies with paint and tattoos and wore copper and pearl jewelry.

Secotan, unlike some other villages in the region, was not surrounded by a defensive palisade. The people lived in longhouses that were covered with bark or woven mats. They practiced agriculture, raising corn, beans, sunflowers, and other crops and supplemented these foods with meat and fish.

John White’s painting of Secotan showed the people performing a variety of tasks. Several figures stood outside or walked through the village, while others ate from dishes placed on a mat on the ground. In one of the cornfields, a figure perched on a platform to scare away birds. White also showed two circular areas of ritual significance, both surrounded by carved posts. In the larger circle he painted a ring of dancing figures participating in a religious ceremony.

Harriot and White depicted the people of Secotan and their neighbors sympathetically. They did not portray the Indians as faceless savages, but as individual human beings living in an ordered society. As the historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman observed, “White and Harriot together argued in the most forceful and effective way that the American Natives were social beings, possessing all the characteristics necessary to civility: community life and the family structure, hierarchy, and orderliness that made it possible; care for the morrow by cultivating and preserving foods; and all informed by a religious sensibility that honored the human dependence on supernatural forces in the universe.”

During the 400th anniversary in 2007 of the English establishment of Jamestown, White’s painting of Secotan went back on display, for the first time in a generation, in the British Museum (and, later, in three American museums). Its reappearance followed archaeologists’ claims that they had located the town, or a similar settlement, at

Werowocomoco. Uncovered, as it were, almost simultaneously from the archives and from the ground, Secotan seemed almost alive again. At a minimum, the reemergence of the image reminded many about the significance of the original town and of White’s and Theodor de Bry’s versions of it. These related but not identical pictures remain among the most powerful images generated in the age of discovery for the simple fact that they reveal an entire community engaged in its everyday rituals, surrounded by a landscape the residents had altered to meet their needs. The representations of Secotan demonstrated that Europeans recognized that Native Americans were not simple children of nature who lacked civilization. They were, instead, humans who modified their physical world, engaged in religious rituals, and survived and flourished long before the arrival of Europeans.

Further reading: Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (New York: Dover Publications, 1972); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca,

N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000);-, Roanoke:

The Abandoned Colony (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman & Allan-held, 1984); David Beers Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-1606 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Kim Sloan, ed., A New World: England’s First View of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

—Martha K. Robinson