Jamestown settlement as seen by Virginia Indians

©Mary Louise Clifford

When the Great Canoes Came

Published in 1993 by Pelican Publishing Company

Four skeptical teen-agers, struggling to understand their place in the sun, gather around the elderly chief of their Pamunkey tribe in 1686 and challenge her to make sense of their troubled history. As she remembers the devastation wrought in her villages by repeated conflict between the Powhatan Indians and the English settlers at Jamestown, she knows how badly these youngsters need a heritage in which they can take pride.

Before Cockacoeske has completed her tale, three of her young listeners slip away to Jamestown, enticed by promises of English clothes and trinkets. Her nephew Lost Owl is left behind to cope with their defection. His frustration over the flight of his favorite companion, dainty Wind Sighing, mirrors the helplessness his people have endured since the first white men came armed with thundersticks into his rivers.

When the Great Canoes Came tells the story of white exploration and settlement in Virginia as the Indians experienced the intrusion, and their long struggle to cope with the loss of their lands, their temples, and their dignity. Although it is a fictionalized re-creation of a history we all learn from the English point of view, this book relates the actual events between 1560 and 1686 from the perspective of the Powhatan Indians, whom the settlers displaced and consigned to oblivion. How was Lost Owl to carry on when all that his people held sacred had been lost?

Soft cover, map, genealogy, illustrations by Joyce Haynes, bibliography,144 pages. ISBN 1-56554-646-6

School Library Journal: "Students and teachers interested in viewing American history from the Native American perspective will enjoy this well-researched and footnoted fictionalized account of the colonization of Virginia as related by Cockacoeske, the 17th-century Pamunkey Indian who was a successor to Chief Powhatan. . . ."

Chapter 1

The most vivd memory of my childhood is of flight . . . of a hurried gathering of cooking pots and food and tools and blankets and clothes into bundles, and then a long trek through the night.

The women had been preparing food around the evening fires when the first of our braves came stumbling into our village. We knew the minute they appeared that they had not won the victory Opechancanough had promised them.

"We were betrayed! Armed settlers were waiting for us all around Jamestown!"

"Our braves who were posted anywhere close to the island have all been killed!"

Morsels of meat were passed to the warriors, even as the women absorbed the hurried recitation of treachery that had turned the secret attack into a disaster. We children listened raptly, but we knew better than to get underfoot or pester the adults with questions at such a moment.

A few more of our men straggled in as the bundles were hastily wrapped in mats and tied for carrying. Wives and children cried out when they heard that their husbands and fathers had been struck down in the dawn attack.

In a surprisingly short time we were ready for the trail. The longhouses and gardens were simply abandoned as each woman hoisted her bundle onto her back and distributed smaller packages among her children. The canoes and a scout were left behind in case they were needed by others of our braves who might still make their way back to our village and find us gone. They would have no trouble tracing our path through the forest unless they were pressed from behind by enemies. Our people all know the signs that indicate who has passed by and where they have gone.