Creation of the Whites

This is a difficult story to address, because it seems so neutral and gives an account of first contact that seems non-violent. The narrator suggests that the whites “asked the Indians to give them a portion of it [the land] that they might live on it” (66), which we’ll see in later narratives rarely held true in other scenarios. Roger Williams and Thomas Morton were among the few colonists who purchased land from Native Americans and established friendly trade relations with them, so we might use the Yuchi tale to drive home the point that all settlers were not the same and that the population of the New World was highly diverse. Given what Jared Diamond and others tell us about the Greenland Norse, and given the competition between England, Spain, and France for colonial empires, we can assume that the Yuchi tale could pertain to the Norse, the Spanish, the French, or the English: all would alike be seen as “whites” by the native eye.

Such guesswork is less fruitful than attention to the nuances of the story, itself, namely, what the narrative can tell us about European culture from an outside perspective. Why were the whites so restless? What’s all this business about carrying land away in boxes, and then coming back to inform the Indians that “their land was very strong and fertile” (66)? The Yuchi, Passamaquoddy, Iroquois, Narragansett, and Pequot tribes already knew their land was fertile, so the fact that Europeans would feel the need to state the obvious tells us something about the sense of cultural superiority that most explorers brought with them. Perhaps we can deduce something from the boxes about the scientific nature of European society, which had led to technologies like guns and steel, as Diamond points out.

One irony in the narrative is the ostensible tentativeness of the settlers, who seem to skirt the coast in their “house-boat” before returning multiple times and always in greater numbers (65). European history likes to conceive of this period of exploration as an epoch of fearless swashbucklers, but from the indigenous point of view it seems that European fearlessness was directly proportional to numerical advantage. We’ll talk more about Diamond’s explanation of colonial history and its relationship to geographical luck, which may challenge some of our assumptions about American identity.

The questions raised by the Yuchi narrative are more valuable than the conclusions it invites, since most conclusions about this tale cannot avoid being highly speculative. Questions about first contact and race relations should lead us to approach this as a more metaphorical kind of story, where we try to hear the spirit of the story rather than trying to piece together a literal history from it. What does it tell us about the Yuchi people? What does it tell us about Europeans from the indigenous point of view? What does it suggest about the colonial history that followed?