2.4: The Jamestown Colony and the Myth of the Sovereign Family
Lead scholar-producer: Caro Pirri
I: Introduction [0.00-12:14]
Ryan McDermott: In 2015, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece titled “Obama’s Assault on the Self-Sufficient Middle Class: Please, Mr. President, don’t help me raise my children.” It opened like this:
Sound: Voiceover of WSJ piece: Please, Mr. President, don’t help me raise my children. We ordinary folks just want to be free to raise our children, maintain intact families and pass what we’ve built (after taxes) over a lifetime to our children to give them a better start in life.
Ryan McDermott: What this op-ed appeals to—what it defines as what ‘ordinary folks’ are all looking for—is a certain vision of the American family. This family has integrity: it stays “intact.” This family is self-sufficient. It supports itself, it doesn’t want “free stuff” from the government. It does want to be free to make its own choices, like who will look after the children and how they will be raised. The family has authority over itself.
Caro Pirri: This oped is from a few years ago, but the appeal that it makes might be familiar to us. The idea is that freedom means being left alone, not being part of a community or even a society. The family is a community unto itself.
Ryan McDermott: That’s Caro Pirri, my colleague in the English Department here at the University of Pittsburgh.
Caro Pirri: I’m a literary scholar who works on English literature on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in the 16th century, and I study colonial ideas and how they travel back and forth across this ocean, and I track the impact that they have on European social and intellectual life in this period.
Ryan McDermott: Caro says that this idea of the American family as insular and self-sufficient shows up all over our cultural imaginary.
Caro Pirri: It's a frontier idea, American families are "ordinary folks" against the world. We find it, for example, in our narratives of the American frontier. In her famous series of Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder actually describes her childhood and her husband’s, growing up in a cabin in the woods, on a farm, and on a prairie homestead. The settler family existed on the margins of this much bigger civilization, with families and houses and communities; but here and in many earlier colonial descriptions, they’re represented as their own little world in the wilderness.
Ryan McDermott: The Little House stories were culturally influential. They spawned an entire conservative tradition dedicated to the family as a self-reliant unit on the frontier. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who co-wrote and edited the series, would go on to spearhead the libertarian movement in the 1930s. She founded two ‘Freedom Schools,’ whose alumni include the Koch Brothers—wealthy, influential donors to libertarian and conservative causes.
Of course, it’s not just in biographical-historical narratives that we see the sovereign family model at work.
[Beat]
Ryan McDermott: The 2018 film A Quiet Place centers on the Abbott family—a mom, a dad, and their two young children living in rural isolation in a world where stealthy predators destroy anyone who makes a sound. They carry out domestic work in their farmhouse and monitor the outside world from the surveillance system in their basement. Like the Ingalls family in the Big Woods, they live in an isolated, self-sufficient mode.
One of the few moments of audible dialogue occurs when the Abbott children are in danger. The mother addresses the father:
Sound: Audio from The Quiet Place: “Promise me you will protect them. Who are we?” (2:58-3:05)
Ryan McDermott: The parents’ essential identity lies in their ability to protect their children. A family must be able to look after its own. It’s a vision that’s not far off from the Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Caro Pirri: And it’s not far from a lot of American politics, either. These representations of the self-sufficient family as a foundational building block of American society actually migrate from these colonial and frontier contexts, to the foreground of American political life. An analysis of Democratic and Republican national conventions in 2012 found the word “family” to be the third-most commonly used word, more popular than “government” or even “economy.” So this practice dating back to the frontier and even earlier, in which the family becomes a kind of microcosm for a whole society—this is still being used today. Here’s a recent example: Donald Trump speaking before the United Nations Assembly:
Sound: Audio from the United Nations General Assembly: “In America…we believe in self-government and the rule of law. And we prize the culture that sustains our liberty—a culture built on strong families, deep faith, and fierce independence.” (31:39-31:55)
Caro Pirri: And the message is often that strong families are independent ones.
In these moments, we can see how ideas about the family are still shaping our politics, shaping our idea of what families look like but also what being an American is. There are so many places where we get the message that a certain vision of the family as isolated and self-sufficient is the center of American identity and the source of American strength. We might call this family the sovereign family. The sovereign family is insular, self-sufficient, really a world unto itself. This is an idea of the independent family as its own kind of community, with the father as its sovereign.
[05:14]
Ryan McDermott: But that vision doesn’t capture the full demographic reality of how people and families are organized in America today.
Ryan McDermott: Welcome to Genealogies of Modernity. I’m your host, Ryan McDermott. In this episode, we discuss these two histories, the history of the family and of myths about the family. And we connect these histories to one of their key sources: 17th-century Jamestown. We learn how the sovereign family model arose in the context of growing governmental authority; and we ask what might happen if we could see past this dominant idea and discover some new—and old—models of what social life could be.
The sovereign family is an even more insular version of the idea of the nuclear family. So before we talk about the sovereign family specifically, we first need to understand a bit more about the nuclear family, and how it came to be the most widely represented portrait of American family life. David Brooks in an interview with The Atlantic has called the nuclear family a “cult of togetherness” and a “moral unit” but he notes that this family model was really particular to a post-war moment in the 1950s and 60s when there was a broad social safety net. Here are Atlantic reporters Vishakha Darbha and Catherine Spangler interviewing Brooks.
Sound: Audio from Vishakha Darbha and Catherine Spangler: “It’s an image that has been etched in our minds: a family is a married couple with two and a half kids. [Clip-within the clip from Leave it to Beaver: “Oh, great Dad. Yeah, oh great Dad!”] but today, only a minority of American families are traditional two-parent nuclear families.”
Sound: David Brooks: “We’re in a moment of cultural lag. We have an old archaic idea of what family is.” (0:00-0:23)
Ryan McDermott: We might know that the nuclear family doesn’t reflect our contemporary reality in the way that it once did. Nuclear families make up less than half of American families today. But we still see it as one of the main representations of the family. Danielle Bainbridge with PBS Origins talks more about that “cultural lag.”
Sound: Audio from PBS Origins: “Most of us know more than a few families that don’t fit into the typical nuclear family mold, yet despite this diversity, if asked to describe a prototype of the American family, a lot of us will still recall images more reminiscent of Leave it to Beaver than anything we’ve witnessed in real life.” (0:18-0:33)
Ryan McDermott: So why is this vision of the independent family as the American family still so prevalent if it doesn’t reflect demographic reality?
Caro Pirri: Families that are self-consciously styling themselves after this historical vision of the family—in short, families that argue that it’s more traditional, more authentic—these families often link this traditional idea NOT to the 1950s but instead to the very earliest events in colonial American history. They see this independent family model as an authentic inheritance from the country’s founding. Take, for example, the Dugger family. You might know them from their multiple popular TLC documentary shows.
Sound: Audio from 19 Kids and Counting: “This is the story of my family: We’re the Duggars. That’s me, I’m Michelle, there’s Jim Bob, my wonderful husband, and our children. Josh is our oldest, he married Anna, and they have our first grandchildren, Mackynzie, Michael, and Marcus. Then there’s Jana, John David, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Josiah, Joy Anna, Jedediah, Jeremiah, Jason, James, Justin, Jackson, Johannah, Jennifer, Jordyn, and our youngest daughter Josie. If you lost count, that’s a grand total of 19.” (1:30-2:06)
The Duggers are closely connected to Doug Philipps and Vision Forum, the origin of the “Biblical Patriarchy Movement.” And the tenets of “Biblical Patriarchy,” according to the Vision Forum website, include:
Sound: Voice reading Biblical Patriarchy tenets: “A husband and father is the head of his household, a family leader, provider, and protector, with the authority and mandate to direct his household in paths of obedience to God.”
Caro Pirri: Vision Forum doesn’t just recommend this approach to family organization, it also creates a historical context for it in the early 17th century.
Sound: Jamestown’s Dark Winter: “Jamestown: the first permanent English colony in the New World, one chapter in the beginning of a new country. But the colony has a dark secret, a horror hidden away by time.” (0:26-0:40)
Jamestown, Virginia, was the earliest permanent English settlement in the Americas. And when Jamestown celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2007, Vision Forum helped organize a celebration of the founding. On that occasion, Doug Phillips wrote
Sound: Voice reading Doug Phillips: “the providential record of the Christian legacy of law in liberty … was birthed for America at Jamestown”; “we should be celebrating—not apologizing—for our history.”
[10:03]
Ryan McDermott: For some followers of the Biblical Patriarchy Movement, the sovereign family is an integral part of that history. The movement is sometimes colloquially referred to as the “Quiverfull” movement. Here’s Kristiana Miner who grew up in the movement describing it:
Sound: Kristiana Miner: “Basically, the Quiverfull movement is about families being strong in the lord, being strong in their faith, and raising up the lord’s army…there’s actually a song about it…it’s really short it goes… ‘As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are children to their fathers. Fitted so that we can storm the enemy, God’s mighty host of sons and daughters!” (4:47-5:28)
In her book Quiverfull: A History of the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce interviews a family who participated in the Jamestown anniversary celebration—the Mauneys. Here’s how Joyce describes the scene:
Caro Pirri: “In the photograph of the family I have from Jamestown, the men … wear breeches and white stockings; the women are in open-front gowns with petticoats, blue, brown, and dusty rose … Their [five] children beam, all arranged symmetrically around their parents [Paul and Donna].”
Donna tells Joyce that the Mauneys ‘believe in patriarchy. In men leading families and women growing up to be homeworkers…If you read about it, colonial America embraced that. It’s interesting that they’re critical of everything colonial America stood for.’”
Ryan McDermott: Sounds like the sovereign family model.
Caro Pirri: The Mauneys embrace the sovereign family model: families as strong, independent units, with power and authority concentrated in the family’s internal leader. And for them, this family is quintessentially American. It represents “everything colonial America stood for.” This vision of the family does go back to the earliest colonial narratives of the Americas. But the actual family structure it describes doesn’t go back quite that far. The history of family composition is a different thing than the myth of the self-sufficient, sovereign American family.
II: Critical Genealogy [12:14-26:05]
Ryan McDermott: So what was the family like in the early days of Jamestown?
Caro Pirri: It’s complicated.
So in this period, there were really two main ideas about how to define a family. One of them was really to think about the family as lineage or a kind of bloodline, a kind of biological genealogy—of, you know, people who are related to each other. And the other model of family was the household model: so everyone who lives together under the same roof, whether or not they are biologically related, are included in this household, in this family. And households often included parents, children, relatives, but also indentured workers, servants, enslaved people, and wards—and wards were sort of young people from other families that usually a higher status family looked after.
Ryan McDermott: So Jamestown families weren’t all small nuclear ones—and they weren’t all independent and self-sufficient.
Caro Pirri: Families were really often reliant on people who belonged to other households and had other kinship relationships outside of the nuclear family.
Ryan McDermott: What about the colony itself? Was the colony self-sustaining?
Caro Pirri: Well, the colony as a whole was dependent too, on supply ships from England and on the Powhatan. When it came to Jamestown’s early days, self-sufficiency is really a myth. The Jamestown settlers were far from independent. They did bring plows, but they failed to cultivate successful harvests.
I actually discussed this with Steven Mentz, who is a Professor of English at St. John’s University, and he studies the early American colonial period. And he specializes really in that relationship between England and the Americas.
Steve Mentz: Right, that they're barely able to sustain themselves, yeah.
Caro Pirri: So that's sort of like the issue with that strategy at least early on. Is that all the colonies are failing and they're just sort of consolidating failure?
Steve Mentz: they're all dependent upon money from investors in London … they're just not super prosperous places. They need people from England because the people starve and die of diseases and they need money and they also need markets once they eventually have some kind of viable crop, which is usually tobacco. Early on it's tobacco and you know that there's both a boom and tobacco in the 1620s and then a bust that follows it soon after. So these are pretty tenuous economic and social places in the early years in the 17th century.
Ryan McDermott: In the earliest days of Jamestown, these settlers relied primarily on supply ships for their grain stores and on the surrounding Indigenous nations. The Tidewater region of Virginia was controlled by the Powhatan. The Powhatan were a paramountcy or grouping of tribal polities who had their own individual chiefs, but also came under the authority of the paramount chief, who himself was called Powhatan. One of the tribes in the paramountcy was the Paspahegh. Paspehegh was also the name of a town. It was around six miles north of Jamestown, along the James River.
[15:17]
Caro Pirri: When the English arrived in Jamestown, they relied extensively on existing Powhatan agricultural and trade networks to survive. But the wreck of a supply ship led to increasingly strained relations. English people tried to raid Powhatan and Paspahegh grain stores, they demanded lower corn prices than Powhatan paramountcy—which was really a vast network of tribes ruled by Powhatan himself—were prepared to accept. This led to the “Starving Time” and then to the imposition of martial law.
Ryan McDermott: The “Starving Time” refers to two periods in 1607 and 1609 when the colony threatened to collapse from hunger. George Percy was one of the original Jamestown settlers and an officer of the town who documented these early years in his writings. He describes the conditions of hunger:
Sound: Jay voiceover: “And now famine beginning to look ghastly and pale in every face, that nothing was spared to maintain life and do those things which seem incredible, as to dig up dead corpses out of graves and to eat them. And some have licked up the blood which hath fallen from their weak fellows."
Ryan McDermott: Hunger ravaged the population.
Sound: Jay voiceover: “Of five hundred men we had only left about sixty. The rest being either starved through famine or cut off by the savages.”
Ryan McDermott: His account of the Starving Time brings us intimately close to Jamestown family life. But what we find is stunningly violent:
Sound: Jay voiceover: “And amongst the rest, this was most lamentable: that one of our colony murdered his wife, ripped the child out of her womb and threw it into the river and after chopped the mother in pieces and salted her for his food [which was] not discovered before he had eaten part thereof.”
Ryan McDermott: Jamestown’s archaeologists have corroborated accounts like this one. This salted wife story spread widely because it captured the horrors of Jamestown’s assault on families and relationships. The archaeological studies tell us that women and girls were often the first targets.
Sound: Dr. William Kelso audio: “I’m standing here in the archaeological excavation of a cellar room that is located within the site of 1607 James Fort. Here we recently discovered the mutilated skull and severed leg bone of an English teenage girl that was found lying among the discarded butchered horses, other animal bones, dogs, that indicates that this material was deposited from the Starving Time of 1609 to 1610.” (0:13-050)
Ryan McDermott: This is Dr. William Kelso, Director of Archaeology of the Jamestown Rediscovery Project. Researchers concluded that these bones of “Jane,” as the English girl has been dubbed, gave the first forensic evidence of survival cannibalism at Jamestown.
When external supports failed, Jamestown families turned inwards on each other. And it’s an irony of history, as Caro Pirri tells it, that these graphic failures of family life contributed to the myth of the sovereign, self-sufficient family.
Caro Pirri: In 1610 (right around the Starving Time, right after the Starving Time) Thomas West, also known as Lord De La Warr, arrives in Jamestown to save the collapsing colony.
Ryan McDermott: Why is he called De La Warr? Does he just really like War?
Caro Pirri: Well, yes! But also, he was the third Baron De La Warr from an aristocratic family. He got his start like many colonial governors did, in the colonization of Ireland, and eventually was named to the king’s council for Virginia overseeing the American colonial project. He did impose martial law in the fort and really turned the settlement project into a military campaign against the Powhatan, and specifically against Powhatan civilians. He was notorious for his cruelty—he would, for example, cut off the hands of captives, burn people alive.
He’s appointed governor, he institutes martial law, and he implements a regime of control that isolates people in the colony and in their homes, to carefully maintain this hierarchy of corporal punishment. It is in the context of this new, powerful governmental regime that we first see this image of the sovereign family—not as a description of actual families in Jamestown, but in a metaphor describing the settlement as a whole.
Ryan McDermott: De La Warr describes his role as governor this way:
Sound: Zach voiceover: “That captain that will honestly and religiously discharge himself and the duty entrusted to him shall do well to conceive of himself, as the master of a family, who is at all times…so to govern himself… as knowing assuredly that all the crimes and trespasses of his people under him shall be exacted at his hands, not only by his superior officer and judge here, but by the great judge of judges, who leaves not unpunished the sins of the people, in whose hands the power and sword of justice and authority is committed, to restrain them from all delinquencies, misdeeds and trespasses.”
[20:11]
Caro Pirri: The picture De La Warr paints here is actually a picture of the sovereign family. It is ruled by the father (De La Warr himself); he is a strong patriarch who protects the family and has absolute authority to discipline its members. And this family is insular. There is a stark separation between this Jamestown family and neighboring families (for example, Powhatan families). But the picture is a metaphor for an autocratic government control over the colony.
Ryan McDermott: How common was it for a ruler to present himself as a father of his people?
Caro Pirri: It was actually one of King James I’s favorite metaphors. James was the king of England during the time that the Jamestown settlement was first established, in the first few years of the seventeenth century. King James had a problem on his hands when he came to power. He wasn’t the son of England’s previous monarch, Queen Elizabeth. He also wasn’t English—he was Scottish. And James faces, then, a little bit of a legitimacy crisis. Not a legal legitimacy crisis, but more of a cultural legitimacy crisis. Not being a monarch’s direct descendent, not being English, how could he get the English to accept his authority?
He does so by using this metaphor of fatherhood. In one 1610 speech to Parliament, for example, he says that “Kings are compared to fathers of families, for a king is truly … the politic father of his people.” It’s as if he were saying to the English, “I may not be your queen’s son; but I am like a father to you in how I will care for you and protect you.” And of course, a father who protects his children also has certain rights over his children. For a monarch, protecting the country also meant having the power to punish lawbreakers. In his 1610 speech, James noted that fathers “had of old … the power of life and death over their children and family.”
Caro Pirri: This “father” image, this metaphor for power made its way to the colonies. In Jamestown, John Smith actually uses the word “father” to translate the Powhatan word for “ruler,” even though the Powhatan language (which is an Eastern Algonquin language) had a different word for “father.” And then, like King James, De La Warr had a political crisis to resolve and he also turns to this metaphor. He had to save the colony from collapsing from starvation and violence. So he used the same tool—this metaphor of fatherhood and family—to present himself as a father to justify his absolute rule over the individual people inside the Jamestown colony, and also to claim the right to punish them.
Ryan McDermott: This is a really key point. The sovereign family idea didn’t come to prominence because it represented actual families in Jamestown. It came into prominence because of these family metaphors—the metaphor that made De La Warr into a father, which made Jamestown itself into the family. It was the colony—not the families of individual settlers—that became the first real model of the independent, self-sufficient, sovereign family.
Caro Pirri: Exactly. One of the main reasons that De La Warr wanted a “fatherly” right to punish the colonists was that he wanted to be able to keep them inside the colony. One of the “misdeeds” he punished most severely was defection, or running away from the colony.
Sound Zach voiceover: “No man or woman, (upon pain of death) shall run away from the Colonie, to Powhatan, or any savage Werowance else whatsoever.”
Ryan McDermott: Defection to join the native population—in terms of physical movement or cultural change—was a specter that haunted many English imaginations, thanks to another recent colonial experience: the English occupation of Ireland. In the 12th century, the Anglo-Normans had conquered large pieces of Irish land, which the English kings then claimed sovereignty over. In the 1500s, there was a renewed campaign of confiscating Irish land and colonizing it with English settlers. Here’s Dr. Jean Feerick from John Carroll University describing that context. She works on ideas about blood inheritance in the early modern period, and talks about how the English colonization of Ireland created new ways of defining human nature for the English:
Sound: Jean Feerick audio: As that new round of settlers went over to Ireland, they encountered their antecedents from the Norman invasion and were really sort of struck by how much they had blended with the Irish community. (11:33)
And for this, the new round of colonizers, who we call the new English, as compared with the Old English from 400 years prior, they were horrified. They were horrified at what they saw, and they described it through this term degeneration.
[24:50]
Caro Pirri: When English colonizers went to Ireland and later to North America, they feared that colonists would defect, would mix with cultures and conditions outside the colony, and what they called “degenerate,” or become corrupted by what they were taking in from the outside. So in Jamestown, when De La Warr represents the colony as a family, he really wants it to be this insular family: he wants to create this firm boundary between the inside of the colony and the outside, a boundary that no one can cross.
So we know that this idea of the insular family was not true for individual colonists as much as it was a model for the whole community, a model that arose out of this need to impose and legitimize this authoritarian control, and really restrict the kinds of bonds and relationships that colonists could have. This might not seem to be a myth at the level of the whole society that we have inherited. After all, the Mauneys are talking about their own family when they talk about reproducing this colonial idea, not their community as a whole. But this conception of the community or even the nation as an authoritarian family that strictly limits what kinds of relationships are sanctioned and which aren't IS still present today, and it's actually gaining momentum.
III: The Sovereign Family [26:05-32:35]
Ryan McDermott: Glenn Youngkin campaigned in Virginia partly on the warning that Democrats sought to stand between parents and their children. One of Youngkin’s supporters recounted, “The more I’ve listened and paid attention, the more that I see what’s happening in schools and on college campuses. And the stuff I see, I don’t want corrupting my children.”
Caro Pirri: Americans with similar sentiments have been flocking to a growing movement known as the parental rights or parental sovereignty movement, which aims to secure greater parental control over the conditions in which children grow up. “As of mid-March [2023],” writes the Christian Science Monitor, “proposed parental rights legislation has emerged in at least 32 states, up from 18 states in 2022.”
The language of the parental rights movement resonates with the vision of the sovereign family, defined by its integrity, self-sufficiency, and authority—how it exists as a community independent of other communities and makes its own choices for its members. 17th-century lawmakers presented themselves as parents. In this movement, parents are lawmakers.
In a 2008 article in First Things, John E. Coons wrote that, “Individual parents make law for the sons and daughters who are their subjects … Parents are, to their children, a government more nearly complete than the state itself: legislator, executive, and judge.” This quote appears in an article titled, “In Defense of the Sovereign Family,” and it used the language of sovereignty: parents, quote, “typically exercise almost exclusive dominion over the minds and bodies of their own children.”
[Beat]
Ryan McDermott: This vision of the sovereign family, showing up so prominently in more and more political and cultural spaces today, has many sources. The Jamestown story is one of them. But why would this particular source be so important to people like the Mauneys, who connect the sovereign family to “everything colonial America stood for”?
Caro Pirri: Colonial America is an origin point. For some people, what we love and value about America had its birth in that origin point, and we can sustain all those things we value by returning to the origin point and modeling ourselves in its image. According to Doug Phillips of Vision Forum, “The story of Jamestown is one of imperfect but remarkable men who were instruments of a sovereign Creator, and they established a nation of law and liberty under God.” When families look back to Jamestown, they’re putting together a genealogy that aspires to nothing less than to make their own family the true heir of America’s providential founding.
Ryan McDermott: This series has been exploring different kinds of “modernity talk.” In one sense, the “sovereign family” image doesn’t seem to push modernity claims at all; it tells us we need to be imitating certain structures from the past.
Caro Pirri: But it does echo that sort of modernity claim that says “the problems of the past have been resolved and everything good from the past can be carried forward.” The image of the sovereign family purports to keep us on the path that produced American greatness, while hiding the uncertain and desperate conditions that are also earlier on this path.
[29:18]
Ryan McDermott: What uncovers that hidden past is critical genealogy. As we've discussed, critical genealogy scrutinizes the truth of noble origin stories; it often finds that a favorable myth has been laid over a more complicated and troubling past.
Critical genealogy tries to see the past without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, to see moments as they appeared in the moment—chaotic, uncertain, not destined to one particular future, but open to many possible futures. That’s how the Jamestown moment appeared to the people who were living in it, as Steven Mentz describes:
Sound: Steve Mentz audio: And I think that there's a tendency to sort of assume that, you know, when John Smith and everybody lands in Jamestown that they're like the first step of the the British Empire on which the sun never sets. And like eventually Britain has an Empire 150 years later, but the journey from this catastrophic early colony that almost falls in on itself and really almost fails and the, you know, the later conquests of the, you know, the 18th and 19th century like there are there are historical continuities, but I think it's wrong to see—I think it is a misreading of the earlier period to read it through the lens of the later period. (22:20)
Ryan McDermott: The colony’s success was far from guaranteed. And success could have taken on many different forms. Early in Jamestown’s life, before De La Warr forbade colonists to flee to the Powhatan, there was another version of a settler future—one in which settlers designed settlements without walls and integrated into Powhatan life. This was a future that was possible at one time.
Caro Pirri: Powhatan did actually offer to include Jamestown as a subsidiary polity under the Powhatan Paramountcy. John Smith participated in a ceremony with the Powhatan which modern historians now believe may have been intended to designate Jamestown as a subsidiary nation. In John Smith’s 1624 Generall Historie of Virginia, records this event:
Jay voiceover: “Powhatan … came unto [John Smith] and told him now they were friends, and presently he should go to Jamestown, to send him two great guns, and a grindstone, for which he would give him the Country of Capahowosick, and forever esteem him as his son Nantaquoud.”
Caro Pirri: Smith never followed through with this recognition of Powahatan’s paramount power over Jamestown. But what if he had? Just imagine how different the history of Jamestown—and maybe America—might have looked.
[Beat]
Ryan McDermott: Moments like this draw attention to the seemingly infinite array of factors that led to the present. They show how easily those factors could have produced a different present. There was no easy, inevitable path from there to here. And when we look at the paths not taken in the past, we can see new paths we might take in the future.
This is the work of creative genealogy. As we’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, genealogy was used in the Middle Ages to uncover possibilities for new matrimonial relationships. Creative genealogy can also help us today as we look for new possibilities for family and community relationships.
IV: Creative Genealogy [32:35-41:00]
Ryan McDermott: When we look back at the fatherhood metaphors used by Lord De La Warr in Jamestown, we see that he wanted to justify certain kinds of power for himself—including the power to punish and the power to control social life.
Caro Pirri: In Jamestown, and in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1640s, colonial rulers imposed strict laws regulating how people were allowed to gather.
Ryan McDermott: When we look at these laws through the lens of creative genealogy, we realize they have something to teach us.
Caro Pirri: Just from the fact that rulers found it was necessary to pass them, these laws tell us how people did want to gather and form community when they were free to choose how to do so.
In Jamestown, for example, Lord De La Warr’s policies were gathered into a pamphlet called Laws Divine, Morall and Martial, which has references to “gaming” that suggest that people were convening to play games together. We hear that one of the governor’s jobs is to round up people who are staying out late in public houses or in assemblies and send them home. So we have records of colonists convening with each other being forced back into these private spaces. And restrictions on trade in this same document also tell us that colonists were establishing informal trade and barter relationships with each other and with Indigenous people. Restrictions on movement outside the colony tell us that people were trying to associate and relate outside of the household.
Ryan McDermott: Like Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was another early American settlement, this one controlled primarily by the Puritans. John Winthrop was governor in the 1630s, and he prioritized unity in the colony. He also represented members of the colony as a single family or even as a single body. In his famous “City on a Hill” sermon, he said,
Sound: Voiceover of John Winthrop: “For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection.”
Caro Pirri: Historian M. Michelle Jarrett Morris has argued that Puritans’ “devotion to their own families often came at the cost of those who lacked strong family networks.”
It was difficult for people outside family networks to form groups together. Morris talks about how during this period people were required to live “under household government” over which the father of the household had supreme authority. The colony prohibited nighttime gatherings between single people and unmarried people in public, and charged offenders with “Enterteyeneing sundry young persons of both sexes, other mens children & servants unseasonably in the nighttime.” Those who didn’t fit into the family framework were trying to form these provisional kinds of community outside the framework of “household government” and the sovereign family.
[35:24]
Ryan McDermott: When we take another look at colonial history, we find other models for relationships—not models that have become as culturally prominent as the sovereign family vision, but ones that suggest important forms of human community nonetheless. The same is true if we look at Indigenous history.
Caro Pirri: In the Powhatan paramountcy in Virginia, power was more distributed than it was in neighboring Jamestown—or back in King James’s England.
The area of the Virginia tidewater region that Powhatan ruled was called Tsenacomacah or “densely populated land” and the capital city was Werowocomoco. Historians have called this territory the “Powhatan crescent” but Powhatan wasn’t an absolute ruler like James. He was Pamunkey in origin and had more control over the polities that were closer to Werowocomoco and less control over those farther away. This is less of an inside/outside model with hard borders like Jamestown and more of a center/fringe model of governance. The Virginia river system is really a kind of metaphor for this web—it’s a grouping of tributaries that leads into the Chesapeake Bay.
And Powhatan's authority as paramount chief over the individual tribal leaders was also not absolute. Women had more expanded roles. As well as men, they could also be heads of communities and hold other leadership positions. Here’s a historian with the Jamestown settlement project talking about Powhatan women in the 17th century:
Sound: Jamestown Trust Audio: “Historically among the Powhatan tribes, leaders of the tribes were called weroansquas, which is a term that roughly translates to female chief.” (0:27-0:33)
Caro Pirri: Some communities in Indigenous America were run by men like Powhatan; but some were actually run by women like the Pamunkey werowansqua Cockacoeske, who ruled her people for 30 years during the encroachment of the English and negotiated a treaty in 1677 on behalf of all the Powhatan tribes.
The English could accommodate the occasional female ruler—for example, you know, Elizabeth I—but ordinary English women wouldn’t have had the same levels of social autonomy as ordinary Powhatan women. George Percy gives us a glimpse of what everyday life would have looked like for Powhatan women when he describes a Paspahegh town:
Jay Voicover: … “In the Woods by chance we spied a path-way … we traced along some four miles, all the way as we went…the ground all flowing over with fair flowers of sundry colors and kinds, as though it had been in any Garden or Orchard in England. There be many Strawberries, and other fruits unknown: we saw the Woods full of Cedar and Cypress trees … we kept on our way in this Paradise, at length we came to a Savage Towne, where we found but few people, they told us the rest were gone a hunting with the Werowance of the Paspiha [Paspehegh]: we stayed there a while and had of them Strawberries, and other things.”
Ryan McDermott: The town had “few people” because not only the men but the women also were out doing different kinds of work. What did this work look like for the women?
Caro Pirri: Historian Helen Rountree analyzes it this way. She says the reason that the town seems empty is not only because the men have left to go on a hunt but also because many of the women would have left too, cultivating the fields and gathering plants. As Rountree explains, Paspahegh women were not “stay at homes.” They were always traveling to different areas, from marshes to places where they would dig up tuckahoe roots for bread. Women were largely tasked with maintaining this vast agricultural grid and growing plants and gardens. And so when Percy describes eating these strawberries, he’s not just eating these wild strawberries he finds in the woods … he’s instead interacting with this agricultural system that was carefully organized and maintained by the women of this town.
Another thing to note here is that these women are doing kin-based and collaborative work that is social rather than housebound, and that is expanding into these different coworking spaces inside and outside the town, all of which were extensions of the town and also extensions of the work they’re doing in the household. So, Paspahegh women are really interdependent in their working habits. They would have been split into groups of friends or associates rather than strictly family groups. The family here is really embedded in a community that is dispersed and rearranged through these working practices.
Ryan McDermott: These expanded roles for women weren’t limited to the 1600s, either.
This is Chief Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock Tribe, speaking to the Virginia Indian Oral History Project in 2016.
Sound: Chief Anne Richardson audio: even in my lifetime and in contemporary times, women have always played a prominent role in government. There’s never been a reluctance for women to be deeply involved in the political life of the tribe (15:15-15:29)
[39:59]
Ryan McDermott: Today, Indigenous nations still show an alternative to the sovereign family model.
Caro Pirri: The sovereign family tends to separate itself as its own independent community. To be an ethical member of an Indigenous community, however, is, quote, “to be engaged in relationships—relationships to land and place, to a people, to non-human relatives, and to one another.” Those are the words of Matika Wilbur (a Tulalip TOO-Lay-LIP and Swinomish SWIN-omish photographer) and Adrienne Keene (a Cherokee academic and writer). They run a podcast called “All My Relations” on what it means to be Indigenous in the 21st century.
Caro Pirri: Blackfoot scholar Billy Wadsorth has said that a true model of human needs “would be centered on multi-generational community actualization.” He says that humans can meet their needs and truly flourish only when the larger group is also flourishing—and we really need to see the larger group as much larger than a single family unit forging their own independent way.
V: Conclusion [41:00-45:25]
Ryan McDermott: As the demographic data shows, America today has a variety of family forms beyond the sovereign family model. But those forms still aren’t providing everyone with everything they need. In his 2020 Atlantic article on the nuclear family, David Brooks wrote:
“We’ve seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality—all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can’t quite return to a more collective world. In 1988, historians Steven Mentz and Susan Kellogg wrote: ‘Many Americans are groping for a new paradigm of American family life, but in the meantime a profound sense of confusion and ambivalence reigns.’ Those words are even truer today.”
Some people are looking for the paradigm of family life in even more intensive versions of the sovereign family. But others are looking for new models of the family altogether. Like the unmarried citizens who wanted to congregate in Plymouth Bay, some single mothers are banding together in “mommunes” to share costs and give each other support. Co-housing groups and communal housing spaces provide shared resources and living spaces to groups like young parents who want support in raising children, or to the “two-spirit” community who need a safe space from family and domestic violence. Brooks describes groups like the Other Side Academy, Becoming a Man, Weave: The Social Fabric Project, in which members form committed, family-type bonds, caring for each other materially and emotionally. Frederick J. Riley, Executive Director of Weave, describes the kind of community building that Weave supports:
Sound: Frederick J. Riley audio: “Aisha Butler in Chicago who looked out her window and saw some kids throwing rocks at each other and decided at that point that she had to do something about it, so she started buying up these vacant lots in the Inglewood neighborhood of Chicago so that young people could just have a place to hang out and do their homework. And so, everywhere they went they were being introduced to these people, and they came back and said, you know, although we have these issues that are plaguing our society or humanity, there are still people who are working quietly alongside one another to help make their neighborhoods and their community and ultimately the world a better place.” (25:15-25:52)
All these groups represent “forged families.” Larger than the imagined sovereign family, not restricted to biological bonds, and not cut off from the surrounding community, they are open to newcomers who need them.
There are many models of family and community. And it isn’t that one is inherently better or more ethical or more “American” than any other. But it happens that the sovereign family gets more representation in our stories, in our political messaging, in our cultural imaginary. Maybe some of the sense of confusion and ambivalence around our family paradigm comes from the fact that we want family, community, and connection, but the family model represented most prominently isn’t the kind of model we all want and need. Maybe if we represented other forms more broadly—if we reflected our history and current reality more accurately—if we told more stories like Aisha Butler’s in Chicago—we could better imagine the kind of family and connections we want. And that might help us live them better.