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Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures
Frederic W. Gleach offers the most balanced and complete accounting of the early years of the Jamestown colony to date. When English colonists established their first permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607, they confronted a powerful and growing Native chiefdom consisting of over thirty tribes under one paramount chief, Powhatan. For the next half-century, a portion of the Middle Atlantic coastal plain became a charged and often violent meeting ground between two very different worlds.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
243 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1997
About the author
Frederic W. Gleach
17 books2 followersFrederic Gleach found anthropology and archaeology in his second go at college. He completed his undergraduate studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, then completed his PhD in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He has done archaeological work in Virginia, Illinois, and Spain. His first book, Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures, was developed from his doctoral thesis. With Regna Darnell, he was a founding editor of the series Histories of Anthropology Annual; they also co-edited (and wrote many entries for) Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association: Presidential Portraits - a collection of short intellectual biographies of the AAA's presidents that gives an interesting perspective on the discipline in the US. Gleach is currently Senior Lecturer and Curator of the Anthropology Collections at Cornell University.
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July 28, 2020
The Powhatan Nation of Native Americans on the one hand, and the Colony of Virginia established in 1607 by English settlers on the other hand, had, even at the best of times, an uneasy coexistence in the lower Chesapeake Bay region; and the best of times in 17th-century Virginia were few and far between, as Frederic W. Gleach makes clear in his 1997 book Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia.
Author Gleach was a visiting professor of anthropology at Cornell University when he published this thought-provoking study that addresses A Conflict of Cultures (the book’s subtitle) by seeking out hitherto neglected sources of information, such as oral testimony from the Powhatan people’s living descendants, some of whom live on the Mattaponi and Pamunkey reservations in rural eastern Virginia today.
That testimony from descendants of the Powhatan gives credence to Gleach’s suggestions regarding the Powhatan culture of the early 17th century. For instance, Gleach suggests, with regard to the Powhatan view of warfare that “War was undertaken to right a wrong, to correct improper actions; it was a means of restoring justice and teaching proper behavior” (p. 51). The difference between this view and the 17th-century European view of war – that warfare was a way to increase the power of one’s own, God-favored nation, and to decrease the power of other nations despised by God – is self-evident.
The Powhatan also believed that, in war, “If the cause and its leader were just, the force would be undefeatable” (p. 53), and that “a defeat represented a lack of sufficient support by spiritual powers” (p. 155). This belief on the Powhatan people’s part establishes an intriguing parallel with the way that 17th-century Europeans – whether Spanish and French Catholics, or Dutch and English Protestants – invariably believed that God was on their side in war, and sometimes had to reconcile that belief with the fact of military defeat.
The cultural context for Elizabethan and Jacobean England was, unsurprisingly, quite different from that for the Powhatan Nation and other Algonquian nations of eastern North America; and in a chapter titled “Prolegomena,” Gleach provides examples of pre-Jamestown actions by the English that looked ahead to the seemingly inevitable breakdown of relations between the Jamestown Colony and the Powhatan Nation after 1607.
More than two decades before Jamestown, during the 1584-87 English attempts to establish the Roanoke Colony in what is now North Carolina, colonial leader Ralph Lane repeatedly complained about the “failures” of an Indigenous ruler named Wingina to provide him with aid that had supposedly been promised. Gleach aptly points out that Lane’s complaints “have almost a quality of paranoid ravings, likely based in the colonists’ desperate need for food, their increasing demands upon the Indians, who increasingly rejected them, and Wingina’s apparent decision in the spring [of 1586] to remove his village from the vicinity of the colony” (p. 101). Lane eventually raided Wingina’s village and cut off the chief’s head – one of the first of many examples of English behavior in colonial America wherein “inhumane practice was justified by political expediency; the end justified the means” (p. 101).
Gleach’s recounting of the arrival of the English in Tsenacommacah (the Powhatan name for the territory), and of the swift deterioration of relations between the two peoples, leads swiftly to a consideration of two Powhatan attacks against the English, in 1622 and 1644, both of them led by the Powhatans’ war leader-turned- paramount chief Opechancanough. Wikipedia refers to these two episodes as the Second and Third Anglo-Powhatan Wars; Gleach terms them “coups,” in the Native American sense of the word “coup” as meaning “a blow, a successful stroke” (p. 4).
For many years, of course, students at Virginia schools would have been taught that both episodes were “massacres” – that the Powhatan goal in both conflicts was to destroy the colony, utterly and forever, through a genocidal wiping out of every single Anglo-Virginian. This culturally biased way of referring to Native American methods of warfare has a long and unfortunate pedigree in American history; consider the way in which the Second Continental Congress, toward the end of the Declaration of Independence, charges that King George III “has endeavoured to bring on our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” So often, throughout American history, a conflict between Indigenous forces on the one hand, and Anglo-American colonials or United States forces on the other, has only been called a “massacre” if the Indians won.
Gleach is having none of that. In his view, the Powhatan attacks upon the Virginia Colony in 1622 and 1644 “were not unnecessary and indiscriminate, nor were they attempts at genocide. They were military corrections, severe parallels to the slap on the wrist administered to a disobedient child – in this case, administered to an unruly minority population who had been permitted to settle in Powhatan territory” (p. 200). In other words, these two attacks were meant to function in much the same way as when the U.S. government launches an air strike in Afghanistan or Iraq or Serbia or Sudan. It gives notice that the state or group receiving the attack has been behaving unacceptably, and provides a forceful reminder that said state or group needs to stop what it has been doing, effective immediately.
But – and Gleach takes pains to acknowledge this fact – the English thought of the attacks as attempts at massacre and genocide; and their enduring belief along those lines did much to set the tone for subsequent Anglo-Powhatan relations during the remainder of the 17th century.
I read Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia while visiting the Jamestown and Williamsburg region last summer, and I found that Gleach’s book provided new perspectives on a part of the world, and of history, that I had thought I already knew quite well. Having gone to college at William & Mary in Williamsburg, I have had the chance to visit the Jamestown historic site many, many times, and its features are quite familiar to me. I like seeing the ruins of the original Jamestown Church tower, with a new nave added on in 1907 for the colony’s 300th anniversary. And then there is the fun of comparing the statues of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. Captain Smith looks very old-school -- up on a pedestal, gazing out in a preoccupied manner toward the James River and future adventures. Pocahontas, a noblewoman of the Powhatan Nation, meanwhile looks more democratic -- standing on the ground, holding out her arms in a courteous and dignified gesture of welcome.
But Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures helped me to see the Anglo-Powhatan dynamic in a whole new way, notwithstanding all the histories of colonial Virginia that I have read. Perhaps it is Gleach’s perspective as an anthropologist that makes the difference. Where an historian might tend to focus on the dates of battles and speeches and acts by legislative assemblies, Gleach starts by looking perceptively at the social and cultural norms of both the Powhatan Nation and the Virginia Colony – beliefs that are so deep-seated that people in both societies would tend to take them for granted. With the basic world-views of the Powhatan and the Anglo-Virginians being so fundamentally different, one cannot find it surprising that the two societies quickly found themselves in conflict that turned deadly.
Published by the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books imprint, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia does well at finding new dimensions in what many might tend to regard as an old and familiar story.
Author Gleach was a visiting professor of anthropology at Cornell University when he published this thought-provoking study that addresses A Conflict of Cultures (the book’s subtitle) by seeking out hitherto neglected sources of information, such as oral testimony from the Powhatan people’s living descendants, some of whom live on the Mattaponi and Pamunkey reservations in rural eastern Virginia today.
That testimony from descendants of the Powhatan gives credence to Gleach’s suggestions regarding the Powhatan culture of the early 17th century. For instance, Gleach suggests, with regard to the Powhatan view of warfare that “War was undertaken to right a wrong, to correct improper actions; it was a means of restoring justice and teaching proper behavior” (p. 51). The difference between this view and the 17th-century European view of war – that warfare was a way to increase the power of one’s own, God-favored nation, and to decrease the power of other nations despised by God – is self-evident.
The Powhatan also believed that, in war, “If the cause and its leader were just, the force would be undefeatable” (p. 53), and that “a defeat represented a lack of sufficient support by spiritual powers” (p. 155). This belief on the Powhatan people’s part establishes an intriguing parallel with the way that 17th-century Europeans – whether Spanish and French Catholics, or Dutch and English Protestants – invariably believed that God was on their side in war, and sometimes had to reconcile that belief with the fact of military defeat.
The cultural context for Elizabethan and Jacobean England was, unsurprisingly, quite different from that for the Powhatan Nation and other Algonquian nations of eastern North America; and in a chapter titled “Prolegomena,” Gleach provides examples of pre-Jamestown actions by the English that looked ahead to the seemingly inevitable breakdown of relations between the Jamestown Colony and the Powhatan Nation after 1607.
More than two decades before Jamestown, during the 1584-87 English attempts to establish the Roanoke Colony in what is now North Carolina, colonial leader Ralph Lane repeatedly complained about the “failures” of an Indigenous ruler named Wingina to provide him with aid that had supposedly been promised. Gleach aptly points out that Lane’s complaints “have almost a quality of paranoid ravings, likely based in the colonists’ desperate need for food, their increasing demands upon the Indians, who increasingly rejected them, and Wingina’s apparent decision in the spring [of 1586] to remove his village from the vicinity of the colony” (p. 101). Lane eventually raided Wingina’s village and cut off the chief’s head – one of the first of many examples of English behavior in colonial America wherein “inhumane practice was justified by political expediency; the end justified the means” (p. 101).
Gleach’s recounting of the arrival of the English in Tsenacommacah (the Powhatan name for the territory), and of the swift deterioration of relations between the two peoples, leads swiftly to a consideration of two Powhatan attacks against the English, in 1622 and 1644, both of them led by the Powhatans’ war leader-turned- paramount chief Opechancanough. Wikipedia refers to these two episodes as the Second and Third Anglo-Powhatan Wars; Gleach terms them “coups,” in the Native American sense of the word “coup” as meaning “a blow, a successful stroke” (p. 4).
For many years, of course, students at Virginia schools would have been taught that both episodes were “massacres” – that the Powhatan goal in both conflicts was to destroy the colony, utterly and forever, through a genocidal wiping out of every single Anglo-Virginian. This culturally biased way of referring to Native American methods of warfare has a long and unfortunate pedigree in American history; consider the way in which the Second Continental Congress, toward the end of the Declaration of Independence, charges that King George III “has endeavoured to bring on our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” So often, throughout American history, a conflict between Indigenous forces on the one hand, and Anglo-American colonials or United States forces on the other, has only been called a “massacre” if the Indians won.
Gleach is having none of that. In his view, the Powhatan attacks upon the Virginia Colony in 1622 and 1644 “were not unnecessary and indiscriminate, nor were they attempts at genocide. They were military corrections, severe parallels to the slap on the wrist administered to a disobedient child – in this case, administered to an unruly minority population who had been permitted to settle in Powhatan territory” (p. 200). In other words, these two attacks were meant to function in much the same way as when the U.S. government launches an air strike in Afghanistan or Iraq or Serbia or Sudan. It gives notice that the state or group receiving the attack has been behaving unacceptably, and provides a forceful reminder that said state or group needs to stop what it has been doing, effective immediately.
But – and Gleach takes pains to acknowledge this fact – the English thought of the attacks as attempts at massacre and genocide; and their enduring belief along those lines did much to set the tone for subsequent Anglo-Powhatan relations during the remainder of the 17th century.
I read Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia while visiting the Jamestown and Williamsburg region last summer, and I found that Gleach’s book provided new perspectives on a part of the world, and of history, that I had thought I already knew quite well. Having gone to college at William & Mary in Williamsburg, I have had the chance to visit the Jamestown historic site many, many times, and its features are quite familiar to me. I like seeing the ruins of the original Jamestown Church tower, with a new nave added on in 1907 for the colony’s 300th anniversary. And then there is the fun of comparing the statues of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. Captain Smith looks very old-school -- up on a pedestal, gazing out in a preoccupied manner toward the James River and future adventures. Pocahontas, a noblewoman of the Powhatan Nation, meanwhile looks more democratic -- standing on the ground, holding out her arms in a courteous and dignified gesture of welcome.
But Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures helped me to see the Anglo-Powhatan dynamic in a whole new way, notwithstanding all the histories of colonial Virginia that I have read. Perhaps it is Gleach’s perspective as an anthropologist that makes the difference. Where an historian might tend to focus on the dates of battles and speeches and acts by legislative assemblies, Gleach starts by looking perceptively at the social and cultural norms of both the Powhatan Nation and the Virginia Colony – beliefs that are so deep-seated that people in both societies would tend to take them for granted. With the basic world-views of the Powhatan and the Anglo-Virginians being so fundamentally different, one cannot find it surprising that the two societies quickly found themselves in conflict that turned deadly.
Published by the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books imprint, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia does well at finding new dimensions in what many might tend to regard as an old and familiar story.
July 4, 2025
Has a surprising amount of information that has nothing to do with the Powhatan in the first half. the second half has some very sound conclusions.
February 4, 2012
Historians and anthropologists will probably come down on different sides of this, with something of a distributed spectrum between them. Gleach's central claim, sensu Marshall Sahlins, is that an integrated narrative based on the understanding of each of the cultures involved is necessary in order to best apprehend the significance of any historical event.
In the case of Native American-English interaction in colonial Virginia, this integrated narrative can only be achieved once Gleach levels the field with a reconstruction of Powhatan culture. The structure of Powhatan's World follows from these mated goals; Gleach offers first a chapter reassembling Powhatan culture, which he augments with a chapter on English culture during the period of colonization, which in turn is followed by six chapters examining and analyzing various historical interactions between the two cultures, including the capture and "rescue" of Captain John Smith and the "massacres" of 1622 and 1644.
The chapter on Powhatan culture is a fascinating piece of anthropological scholarship based on comparative analysis of other Algonquian groups (a particular area of Gleach’s expertise) and extant documentation. Gleach explains in his introduction that this method of “controlled comparison” was necessary to provide the fullest possible appreciation of the Powhatan Weltanschauung, and that in instances of scarce documentation he employed “controlled speculation” based on interpretation of traits shared among various Algonquian groups. While going to considerable lengths to extensively illustrate the Powhatan world view, Gleach nonetheless stretches some of his source material beyond what seems prudent to historians (including me). His explication of the Smith episode based on Powhatan socio-political conventions is unorthodox and quite absorbing, and I think his insight into Powhatan military practices, including trophy-taking, gives some insight into a very obvious source of tension between the English and the Powhatan.
Finally, Powhatan's World has some pedagogical utility as a somewhat extreme example of anthropological "upstreaming."
In the case of Native American-English interaction in colonial Virginia, this integrated narrative can only be achieved once Gleach levels the field with a reconstruction of Powhatan culture. The structure of Powhatan's World follows from these mated goals; Gleach offers first a chapter reassembling Powhatan culture, which he augments with a chapter on English culture during the period of colonization, which in turn is followed by six chapters examining and analyzing various historical interactions between the two cultures, including the capture and "rescue" of Captain John Smith and the "massacres" of 1622 and 1644.
The chapter on Powhatan culture is a fascinating piece of anthropological scholarship based on comparative analysis of other Algonquian groups (a particular area of Gleach’s expertise) and extant documentation. Gleach explains in his introduction that this method of “controlled comparison” was necessary to provide the fullest possible appreciation of the Powhatan Weltanschauung, and that in instances of scarce documentation he employed “controlled speculation” based on interpretation of traits shared among various Algonquian groups. While going to considerable lengths to extensively illustrate the Powhatan world view, Gleach nonetheless stretches some of his source material beyond what seems prudent to historians (including me). His explication of the Smith episode based on Powhatan socio-political conventions is unorthodox and quite absorbing, and I think his insight into Powhatan military practices, including trophy-taking, gives some insight into a very obvious source of tension between the English and the Powhatan.
Finally, Powhatan's World has some pedagogical utility as a somewhat extreme example of anthropological "upstreaming."
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews