[In Virginia, English colonization sparked dramatic population
declines among Native American communities. While Virginia Indians
numbered about 50,000 in 1607, by the early twentieth century, only a
little over 2,000 remained.] [[link removed]]

HOW THE KIKOTAN MASSACRE PREPARED THE GROUND FOR THE ARRIVAL OF THE
FIRST AFRICANS IN 1619   [[link removed]]

 

Gregory D. Smithers
September 15, 2019
History News Network [[link removed]]

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_ In Virginia, English colonization sparked dramatic population
declines among Native American communities. While Virginia Indians
numbered about 50,000 in 1607, by the early twentieth century, only a
little over 2,000 remained. _

A painting depicting the construction of a fort at Jamestown, close
to Fort Comfort, from National Park Service,

 

Reckoning with the past is never easy. We’ve seen this in the United
States and the United Kingdom this summer, as British universities
[[link removed]] grapple
with their connections to the wealth and human suffering resulting
from transatlantic enslavement, and Americans debate the historical
meaning
[[link removed]] of
the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans
[[link removed]] in
English North America. 

Commemorating the 400th anniversary of what the English colonizer
John Rolfe described as the “20 and odd Negroes” (a number that
was actually closer to 30) has dominated social media and the
summer’s newscycle. But there’s an aspect of this commemorative
activity that hasn’t received much attention. I refer specifically
to the violence that occurred at Point Comfort less than a decade
before the slave ship _White Lion _made anchor in August 1619. On
that spot, a bloody event worthy of historical introspection took
place: the massacre of the Kikotan Indians.That bloody event is
important because it made it possible for the English to take Native
lands and build Fort Henry and Fort Charles. The Kikotan massacre
prepared the ground for the arrival of the first Africans in
Virginia.

The history of English North America and what became the United States
is a complex and often-violent story involving the enslavement of
African peoples and the territorial dispossession and genocide of
Native American communities. This is an uncomfortable history
and neither the British nor Americans have fully reconciled
itwith the contemporary economic, political, and social dimensions of
their respective societies.

Most Americans don’t like to think about genocide as a foundational
part of US history, while the English certainly don’t view their
forebears as capable of perpetrating the mass killing of indigenous
people. However, historian Jeffrey Ostler makes a compelling case for
how genocide is woven into the fabric of North American history in his
most recent book, _Surviving Genocide_
[[link removed]].
In Virginia, English colonization sparked dramatic population declines
among Native American communities. While Virginia Indians
numbered about 50,000 in 1607, by the early twentieth century,
only a little over 2,000 remained.

But did the English initiate a genocide against Virginia’s Indian
people? To answer this question it’s important to define genocide.
The United Nations defined genocide in 1948 as “acts committed
with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group.” Genocide can involve killing members of
a group, causing “serious bodily or mental harm,” deliberately
creating conditions designed to physically destroy a group “in whole
or in part,” imposing measures that prevent births, and forcibly
transferring children out of one group and to another. 

This definition describes not only the “founding” of Virginia but
the course of US history and its relationship to Native
America. Importantly, the genocide of Virginia Indians didn’t occur
within a discrete time period and under well-established bureaucratic
conditions; genocide in Virginia unfolded slowly over a period of
decades.

The opening act in the tragedy of Native land loss, attacks on
indigenous culture and language, the separation of children from
families, and the physical destruction of entire communities, began in
1607 when English ships passed through the mouth of the Chesapeake
Bay. The English aboard those vessels passed lands belonging to the
Accomac, Nansemond, Warraskoyaak, and Kikotan (or Kecoughtan) people.
These weren’t the first European ships the region’s Native people
saw, but the English were different: they were determined to stay.
This wasn’t good news for the Kikotan. They’d once numbered as
many as 1,000, but by 1608 the English estimated that the Kikotanhad
as few as 20 fighting men and perhaps a total population of no more
than 60. The Kikotan had been reduced to a small community vulnerable
to external attacks. Joining the Powhatan Chiefdom, albeit by force,
under the leadership of Wahunsenacawh (Chief Powhatan) offered a
degree of protection from both European and Native American violence
and captive raids.

In the spring of 1608, though, the English probably didn’t seem like
much of a threat to the Kikotans because the English were
starving. Although the Kikotans and other Native communities provided
the English with small parcels of food, in the spring of 1608 the
English were on the verge of abandoning Jamestown. The colonizers were
saved, however, by the arrival of supply vessels from England.

The English recognized they couldn’t sustain a colony that relied on
supply ships from England. They needed to make changes. One of those
changes was establishing trade relationships with Virginia Indians. An
Englishman by the name of John Smith helped to initiate trade talks.
Smith was an ambitious man determined to make a name for himself in
Virginia. Unfortunately for Smith, the Kikotan “scorned” his
advances to engage in trade talks, allegedly mocking him for his
inability to feed himself. Smith wasn’t amused. He immediately let
“fly his muskets,” whereupon the Kecoughtan “fled into the
woods.”

Such incidents seem small and petty when viewed in isolation. However,
these types of encounters grew in regularity and fueled mutual
mistrust along Virginia’s Anglo-Indian frontier. 

That mistrust grew between 1609 and 1611 when the English made plans
to build forts and establish homesteads on indigenous lands at the
mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The Kikotan need only look across the bay
to see how English homesteads had started to displace Nanesmond
families. English intentions were clear. Slowly, methodically, a
genocide was unfolding.

Two factors overlapped to result in the genocide of the Kikotan
people. First, English colonizers began establishing homesteads on
Kikotan lands. Just as they did among the Nansemond, English land use
practices were designed to sever indigenous people from their crops,
sacred spaces, and homes. 

Second, violence played an important role in eliminating the remaining
Kikotan people from their homelands at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. In
1610, the English moved aggressively against the Kikotans. This sudden
English assertiveness was in response to Kikotans aligning with
neighboring indigenous tribes in opposition to the construction of
English forts – including the fort that witnessed the arrival of the
first Africans in Virginia. By early July, 1610, Sir Thomas Gates, the
governor of Virginia, was "desyreous for to be Revendged upon the
Indyans att Kekowhatan" for their opposition to English colonial
expansion.

Colonial officials initiated a plan to “drive” the remaining
“savages” from the land. The violence directed against the Kikotan
people in July 1610 became known as the Kikotan massacre. The exact
number of Kikotan deaths is unknown. Those who did survive the
massacre fled their homelands and took refuge among neighboring
indigenous communities. The Kikotan’s connection to their homeland
was lost.  

For the Kikotans, the physical and psychological toll of the 1610
massacre were compounded by English actions in the proceeding years. 
To reinforce the sense of loss that Kikotan people undoubtedly felt,
the Virginia General Assembly agreed to “change the savage name of
Kicowtan” to Elizabeth City in 1611. The Kecoughtan name remained to
demarcate the foreshore, but in 1619 English families pushed to have
the Kikotan erased from memory and the Corporation of Elizabeth City
established. As the "20 and odd negroes" stepped onto Virginia should,
the colonizers were writing their name over a Native landscape.

The English were changing the landscape that Virginia’a Indians had
nurtured for as long as anyone could remember. When Wahunsenacawh
died in 1618, less than a year before the _White Lion _set anchor at
Port Comfort, Opechancanough, Chief Powhatan’s brother, took up the
fight against English incursions into Powhatan homelands. 

Over the next two decades, violence between English colonizers and
Powhatan warriors broke out in fits and starts throughout Virginia.
The English, however, weren’t leaving. In 1624 Virginia was declared
a royal colony and Native people continued to use violence to prevent
the growing number of colonizers from squeezing them off their
homelands. 

Virginia’s Indians were up against a determined foe. Governor
Wyatt’s response to Indian resistance in the 1620s captured both the
intent and determination of the English: “to root out [the Indians]
from being any longer a people.”

Wyatt’s words are chilling. They reveal that prior to a treaty
between the Powhatan and English in 1646, guerrilla-style warfare
punctuated life in Virginia. So long as this fighting continued the
English would take no quarter with their enemies. Native people,
reduced in numbers and confined to reservations by the 1650s, suffered
traumas that live on today in the stories Virginia Indian’s tell
about seventeenth-century English colonizers. 

In remembering 1619 it’s right to reflect on the lives of the
African people who disembarked from the _White Lion _on the
traditional homelands of the Kikotans. We should also remember the
loss of indigenous life in Virginia, losses that grew as the decades
unfolded. We need not look too far beyond the events of 1610 and 1619
to see how the English treated Native resistance to their expansive
plans for a settler colonial society supported by plantations and the
exploitation of unfree labor. 

At the end of September, Norfolk State University in Virginia will
host academics, journalists, and community members at a summit called
“1619: The Making of America
[[link removed]].”
Sponsored by American Evolution
[[link removed]], the summit will undoubtedly
provide a forum for reflecting on Virginia’s past. I also hope that
in trying to understand the “Making of America” we remember that
English (and ultimately, United States) colonialism was (and is) built
not only with the labor of stolen bodies from Africa, but the stolen
lands of Native Americans. 

_Gregory D. Smithers is a Professor of History and Eminent
Scholar at Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Smithers is the
author of numerous books including The Cherokee Diaspora: An
Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity
[[link removed]] (Yale
University Press, 2015) and most recently Native
Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal
[[link removed]]._

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