Ben Steelman | StarNews Correspondent
We know pathetically little about the Cape Fear Indians, who inhabited the Wilmington area until the early 1700s. We’re not sure what they called themselves (possibly “Daw-Hee”) or what they spoke (probably a Siouan language, similar to the Plains Indians).
A fair idea of how they lived, however, can be gleaned from “Manteo’s World: Native American Life in Carolina’s Sound Country Before and After the Lost Colony” by retired Old Dominion University anthropologist Helen C. Rountree.
Rountree writes about the Croatoans, the Roanokes and the other Algonquian-speaking peoples whom Sir Walter Raleigh’s expeditions encountered in and around Roanoke Island beginning in 1584.
We know rather more about them thanks to the accounts of explorers such as Thomas Hariot, John Lawson (who came along later, in the early 1700s) and particularly the many drawings by John White, the governor of what would come to be known as “the Lost Colony.”
More: Book on Wilmington’s Jewish history helps raise money for Temple of Israel renovations
More: With ‘Uncollected Stories,’ Allan Gurganus serves up slices of North Carolina
Manteo, for those who forgot, was the young Croatoan man who traveled back to England with the first explorers and later became an interpreter and diplomat for the English settlers.
These first Americans lived a Stone Age existence. They had only small amounts of copper, acquired by trade, which they used mainly for jewelry. Nevertheless, they had a self-sufficient, mostly comfortable existence.
It wasn’t Eden. Women — who were expected to farm corn, beans and squash; root for tubers in the marshes; cook; tan hides; make baskets and perform other chores — often developed arthritis as early as their 30s.
Men hunted and fished. It was exhausting work, chasing wounded deer for miles, then lugging the carcasses for miles back to the village or camp. English visitors often saw men lying around between hunts — which, Rountree thinks, led…
Kyleigh Alexander (left), Tania McCormick (middle) and Fatima Taylor are the three women behind the foster care program, called Alternative Care, at Mnaasged Child and Family Services in Munsee-Delaware First Nation, southwest of London. The Indigenous child wellbeing agency is now recruiting Indigenous and non-Indigenous foster parents across Southwestern Ontario to apply. (CALVI LEON, The London Free Press)