Drawing on First Impressions

We’re back with BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. We’re talking about the changing depictions of American Indians by non-Indians. We’re going to turn the clock back now to when those depictions began.

BRIAN: After Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, Europeans were abuzz about his discovery and about the indigenous people who lived there. It didn’t take long for the newcomers’ accounts of these mysterious inhabitants to make their way back to Europe.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: There would have been some just peaceful, descriptive ones. This is what Indian people look like. This is what they wear.

BRIAN: This is historian, Joyce Chaplin. She says there was another strain of images as well.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: There were also a lot of alarming woodcuts and other illustrations that depicted Indians as cannibals with butchered human bodies hanging in the background. And the idea that American Indians were cannibals, all of them indiscriminately, remains a very powerful and lasting prejudice based on those early images.

BRIAN: These outlandish illustrations came mostly from the Spanish, the first colonizers. The earliest English illustrations of the New World came later, most notably from an English colonist named John White.

PETER: White was a member of a small, privately funded expedition that first explored Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina back in 1585. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was bank rolling this whole thing, commissioned White to document the lives of the local tribes who lived there. I asked Chaplin, who has written about White’s work, to describe some of these watercolors.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: He does sort of long shot images of Indian towns, as if he were doing an aerial view almost. And then he does close ups of people engaged in certain activities, or even just portraits– somebody standing there in their everyday clothing, or maybe with some special implements, like a bow and arrow for hunting.

When the images were last on a big display at the British Museum a couple years ago, the curators at the museum worked out reconstructions of what the pigments would have looked like originally. So these people that, you know, I’ve looked at as a scholar years and years and years, who kind of look blank, suddenly pop. They’re looking right back at me. And that really underscored the way in which White was being very careful to depict people possibly even as individuals.

PETER: So anybody who had the opportunity to look at these images would almost feel as if he or she were walking through the town and encountering what John White encountered.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: That seems very clearly to be his intention. You are there. I was there. I could see what these people look like. And here they are. I will introduce them to you.

PETER: Right, so this isn’t a depiction, a hostile depiction of savage people who need to be removed. It’s a much more benign view.

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Yes. There’s an image of one of the towns that shows the people gathered. They’re dancing. More to the point, they’re growing corn. So the whole sense is, this is great. Look how prosperous these people are. These are very peaceful images in sharp contrast to those that had been done of cannibals in the New World, whether they existed or not.

But what always strikes me about the images is how White organizes and displays Indians as if they’re performing to an audience. And so immediately in the pitch that he gives in presenting these images, you have room for suspicion. Could it really have been this nice? Why are all the native people being depicted smiling, and looking welcoming, and holding food?

PETER: You think that might not have been accurate, Joyce. Is that what you’re saying?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Oh, I agree probably people smiled some of the time and held food. But it really looks like it’s emphasizing all the positive attributes.

PETER: So, Joyce, you’ve given us the picture. And it’s a land of peace and plenty, at least that’s what White wants people to think. What motivates him to create these images. There’s no image of conflict. What’s going on?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: Obviously, this is a set of images intended to look appealing, that this is a place where the English will be welcome and will find plenty to eat, a very helpful population. Also because this is colonization done on a small scale, done on the cheap and not a lot of money is put into this, so really the organizers of the Roanoke colony need to recruit settlers. They need to recruit investors. They have to make the colony look good, look inviting.

PETER: Does that lead to an idea that maybe White had this in mind in the kind of imagery he created that is so– was this propaganda?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: It was propaganda, absolutely. The settlement, if it were going to continue at Roanoke, would depend on settlers signing up, investors putting up the money. There were other economic options for investors at this point in time. So a pitch would have to be made. Why do this? What do you get out of this? I mean, there were really pretty serious questions about why it would be worth anyone’s while. So images of a New World that seems productive, that has enough food, that has people who have access to copper, for instance, and possibly other metals, that would have been what investors would have wanted to have seen.

This is a part of the world that seems very bountiful, where the English with metal agricultural tools could probably do even better, with healthy populations, indicating that other populations could move in and do just fine. Nevertheless, there would also be a sense that there’s room for work. The metal tools would make a difference. These are people who should be Christianized.

There are things that the English could accomplish by moving into this part of the world. Not just that they would manage to survive or thrive, but they would fulfill various nationally defined missions to spread Protestantism, to claim territory for England. So the images have that complexity built into them, that they seem very welcoming and non-judgmental about the native people. On the other hand, there’s a message about the room for colonization that these people and their homeland imply.

PETER: So Joyce, the challenge in a way, for us is to take these benign, generous images that seem to me ethnographically accurate and look forward to the history of European-Native American encounters across North America, throughout the Americas. And things look darker and different as we move on. How do we make that connection? Is there something about these benign images that serve perhaps less than benign purposes?

JOYCE CHAPLIN: It’s hard to say what White’s own motivations were. But certainly in the way he made it seem, that this was a land with plenty of room for English people, that set up an expectation that plenty of English people ought to show up. And that’s what happened, that a lot of English people showed up. They wanted land.

They assumed, like White did, that there was plenty of room for them, that America would just keep producing a lot of food and English population could flourish on a much larger scale than Native American populations did. And really, that whole idea that there was plenty of space for Europeans means that this is a fantasy about removing native populations from that landscape, as if there isn’t a real connection between them and the land.

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PETER: Joyce Champlin is a historian at Harvard. Her research on John White’s paintings appears in A New World, England’s First View of America. We’ll post some of these early images on our website, backstoryradio.org.