Beyond the Elder Peaks

As you may already have noticed, I’m playing Virginia Dare in this game. For those of you not familiar with early colonial American history (or certain racist anti-immigration websites I could name), Virginia Dare was the first English child born in the New World. She was born to settlers living in the first British colony in America, Roanoke, which was found to have disappeared about two years after she was born. No one knows what happened to the people of the Roanoke colony, although strong evidence (and persistent folklore) points to their joining a local Native American tribe. In all likelihood, Virginia Dare was raised, lived, and died among Native Americans with little understanding of her birth heritage–which only makes her all the more fascinating and mysterious.

The settlers at Roanoke were the first of many, many white people throughout American history to abandon their culture and join the natives–a tradition which continued until the American government ensured that there were no flourishing native cultures left to join, and a tradition which nonetheless was revived in the 60’s and clumsily continues today under such names as “dropping out,” “walking away,” and “rewilding.” For early European settlers in the Americas, the benefits of walking away were obvious: they were in an unfamiliar land, with unfamiliar weather patterns, flora, and fauna, which made it difficult for them to grow their own food; on the contrary, the natives had lived in that land for generations, knew exactly what was food and how to obtain it, and generally lived an easy and carefree life, especially compared to the settlers’ lives of hard labor, filth, and disease. (And if you don’t believe me, read about the early years of Jamestown. Then bear in mind that Roanoke was worse.)

Virginia Dare is the ultimate symbol of the assimilated immigrant; the first second-generation immigrant in the Americas since people first crossed the Bering Strait some 13,000-odd years ago. One of the myths to spurt up around her was the story of her becoming a white doe. Bearing in mind that deer meat comprised a large portion of the usual Algonquian diet, that image perfectly encapsulates what she represents: adapted to the New World, yet still different. With one foot in the Old World and one foot in the New, she is a figure literally otherworldly.

I can’t be the only one who finds it supremely ironic that she is now used largely as a symbol for anti-immigration advocates (as in the website VDARE, whose logo is a white deer) and North Carolina racists (as a reminder to “keep” North Carolina white). Because I’m fairly obsessed with politics, this was my first association with Virginia Dare. So when Jason suggested that I play her in a Solomon Kane campaign, I was hesitant because of these racist associations, but also intrigued both at the thought of “taking her back” and at the possibility to participate in American myth.

My Virginia Dare answers to the name White Doe, and is a powerful shape-shifting shaman–a career path not generally available to a culture more prone to burning witches than seeking them out for healing. So in one way, she is perfectly at home in her adopted culture. But she is also different in a key way: her parents and the rest of the colonists all had immunities to European illnesses. White Doe’s fellow tribespeople did not, and so diseases such as smallpox swept through them like wildfire, killing off whole villages in the blink of an eye. Neither the Europeans nor the Native Americans knew what was going on. The European settlers would later thank God for the mysterious illness that killed all the savages for them without them having to even lift a rifle, thereby effectively emptying out the continent for them to fill with their towns. They attributed this biological devastation to God’s will that they conquer the New World. In this campaign, many Native Americans (most notably Manteo) attribute it to a powerful and evil witchcraft that all white men possess; he helps White Doe learn to control her witchcraft through the perfection of the shamanic arts so that she won’t continue to poison more innocent people.

As a shaman, her power comes from the land. As a European, her power is destroying the land. This is the tension at the heart of her character, and in a way, it’s a supernatural, fictionalized reflection of the tension in any European-American’s attempt to live on this continent peaceably. As Vine Deloria has pointed out, the only difference between Native Americans and white Americans is that Native Americans made themselves native by learning to live with the land instead of fighting it. We can also choose to make ourselves native, and that’s ultimately what we’ll have to do if we want a world in which we can survive. (No, I don’t think that buying hybrids and fluorescent lightbulbs, and making other miniscule changes to our wasteful way of life is going to save us from global warming, overpopulation, species extinction, and pollution.) Virginia Dare–White Doe–is a mythical example of doing just that. It’s an example we desperately need to learn from.