Gratuitous Historickal Posting

This is interesting:

VIRGINIA BEACH -- Army scientists looking at an archaeological study from 1955 and Colonial records have identified a site off the Lynnhaven River as the long-lost Henry Towne, one of the earliest English settlements in America.

In a 1613 letter, Lt. Gov. Samuel Argall described the outpost near Cape Henry as "Henries Towne," said Randy Amici, who led the team that conducted the work as part of an archaeological study of Fort Story in Virginia Beach.

Other accounts from the time suggest that Henry Towne existed as early as 1610.

"For the first time, we know that there was an early 17th-century English settlement in the city of Virginia Beach that was contemporaneous with Jamestown," Mr. Amici said.

Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement America, was founded in 1607.

The article notes that some other historians dispute this claim, pointing to evidence that suggests Henry Towne dated more toward the middle of the century, but still...

Apparently, a matter of a couple decades isn't preventing the locak historickal recreation crowd from running with this:

Whatever the settlement's date, its connection to early Colonial Virginia has sparked a recreated English town site, an Indian village and a historical drama scheduled to debut in April at nearby Cape Henry.

Financed by the nonprofit First Landing Foundation, the $700,000 project will include more than a dozen structures, an outdoor stage and seating for about 500 people.

"This is just the first phase of what we hope to do here," project coordinator Jeanne Evans said.

Speaking of Colonial Virginny, I see where the Episcopal Church is taking advantage of the approaching 400th anniversary of the Jamestown Settlement to indulge in a little multi-culti self-flagellation:

In many Native traditions, winter is the time for gathering to share stories. Out of those ancient ways came Winter Talk, an annual retreat for American Indian, Alaskan Native and Native Hawai'ian Episcopalians, lay and ordained.

For most of its 19-year existence, Winter Talk was held in Oklahoma. But the 2007 retreat, held January 12-16, gathered more than 70 participants at Chanco on the James, a retreat center owned by the Diocese of Southern Virginia. The center is across the James River from the site of one of the first encounters between the native peoples of North America and immigrants from Europe: Jamestown, founded in 1607 as the first permanent English settlement in what became the colony and later the state of Virginia. It is from Jamestown that the Episcopal Church traces its origins in the Americas.

According to Native American national missioner Janine Tinsley-Roe, holding Winter Talk there was a way of kicking off a year of reflection on the impact of the Jamestown settlement, reaffirming the Episcopal Church's 1997 Jamestown Covenant, and inaugurating a second Decade of Remembrance, Recognition and Reconciliation with indigenous peoples in the Episcopal Church.

Winter Talk is a place and time for native Episcopalians and Anglicans to laugh and cry and pray -- and laugh some more. For despite 400 years of struggle against displacement, poverty, and attempted cultural genocide, no gathering of native peoples is without abundant laughter.

"One of the ways first peoples overcome oppression is through humor," explained the Ven. Dr. Hone T. Kaa, from the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, representing the Mâori people of the "Land of the Long White Cloud."

"We tell jokes about each other as a way of easing the pain, a way of masking exactly how we feel about things," he said. "We are struggling to find our identity in the midst of a majority culture, but it doesn't have to be gruesome. It is what you make of it."

Not that there is no anger -- it is there, and very real. What may be dry narratives in a history book for non-Natives are deeply personal and living family memories that still affect the daily lives of Native people.

At Winter Talk XIX, participants were asked to respond to the story of the Jamestown settlement. What emerged after several days were stories and artwork reflecting the pain that reverberates from the impact of the European invasion as it swept from the East and Gulf Coasts to Alaska and Hawai'i.

Now I've really got no trouble with an honest assessment of the impact of European exploration and colonization of other parts of the world. Sure, it was pretty uniformly brutal owing to the superiority of European technology and social organization (hat tip: Victor Davis Hanson). But what drives me batty is the implication in this sort of kumbaya gathering that before the evil palefaces appeared, all was sweetness, light and harmony.

This is nothing but romantic primitivist sentimentality, indulged in by Europeans out of a sense of guilt and recognized by the nativist crowd as a useful political weapon. The truth is that tribes and peoples have been beastly to each other ever since Og realized that he could pick up a stick and, by whacking Nog, dominate him. And this was no different in America prior to European colonization. Cortez was able to conquer Montezuma because the local tribes were sick and tired of the brutal Aztec hegemony and recognized him as just the guy to get rid of it. Lewis & Clark's journals are full of accounts of the Sioux bullying everybody else on the Missouri and across the Plains, as well as similar local power struggles all the way to the mouth of the Columbia. And the Iroquois' own oral history states that in a time long past, the various branches of their Nation realized that, instead of beating the crap out of each other all the time, it was much more profitable to band together and proceed to beat the crap out of everybody else, which they did expertly and with every indication of keen enjoyment. (Not that some of them, such as the Senecas, didn't keep on beating the crap out of other Iroquois as well.)