ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony and the ways in which some events and programs surrounding this anniversary were engaged by, and appropriated by, American Indians in Virginia. The anniversary of the establishment of the Jamestown colony has been observed with celebratory or commemorative events every 50 years since 1807. What has been remembered and promoted at Jamestown is a story of American origins in the South. Jamestown was the place where the first permanent English-speaking colony was established on the continent that would eventually be largely an English colony. It is remembered as the place of the first representative democratic government in America, and a place where successful maritime commerce based on tobacco cultivation and export took root. Early Jamestown has also been remembered as a place of tragedy and loss for the colonists, many of whom died from starvation, violence, and disease in the earliest years of the colony. For the colonists, such tragedy lends a heroic dimension to the story as they overcame these traumatic events to become the first English colony that persevered and survived.
