to racial harmony: a predominantly European but nonracist United States that
did not differentiate racially between Indians and non-Indians.^99 U.S. history
provides several examples of relatively nonracist enclaves. Sociologists call
them triracial isolates because their heritage is white, black, and red, as it
were. For centuries these communities occupied swamps and other undesirable
lands, wanting mostly to be left alone. The Revolutionary War hero Crispus
Attucks, an escaped slave of Wampanoag, European, and African ancestry, was
a member of such an enclave. The Lumbee Indians in North Carolina comprise
the largest of these groups. Other triracial isolates include the Wampanoags in
Massachusetts, the Seminoles in Florida, and smaller bands from Louisiana to
Maine.^100
The first English settlement in North America, Roanoke Island in 1585,
probably did not die out but was absorbed into the nearby Croatoan Indians,
“thereby achieving a harmonious biracial society that always eluded colonial
planters,” in the words of historian J. F. Fausz. Eventually the English and
Croatoans may have become part of the Lumbees. The English never learned
the outcome of the “Lost Colony,” however. Frederick Turner has suggested
that they did not want to think about the possibility that English settlers had
survived by merging with Native Americans. Instead, Fausz tells us, “tales of
the ‘Lost Colony’ came to epitomize the treacherous nature of hostile Indians
and served as the mythopoetic ‘bloody shirt’ for justifying aggressions against
the Powhatan years later.” Triracial isolates have generally won only contempt
from their white neighbors, which is why they have chosen rural isolation. Our
textbooks isolate them, too: none mentions the term or the peoples.^101
A related possibility for Natives, Europeans, and Africans was
intermarriage. Alliance through marriage is a common way for two societies to
deal with each other, and Indians in the United States repeatedly suggested
such a policy.^102 Spanish men married Native women in California and New
Mexico and converted them to Spanish ways. French fur traders married
Native women in Canada and Illinois and converted to Native ways. Not the
English. Textbooks might usefully pass on to students the old cliché—the
French penetrated Indian societies, the Spanish acculturated them, and the
English expelled them—for it offers a largely accurate summary of European-
Indian relationships.^103 In New England and Virginia, English colonists quickly
moved to forbid interracial marriage.^104 Pocahontas stands as the first and
almost the last Native to be accepted into British-American society, which we