My first script, Dare to Follow, is currently being rewritten and updated into a novel, Weroansqua, that tells the story of Eleanor Dare and the Native peoples of North Carolina in much greater detail. I am convinced that Eleanor was an extraordinary young woman who possessed, like her artist father, John White, a deep curiosity about the world around her. The gradual dissolution of her colony, the Roanoke Colony, would have pushed her to explore and understand the Chowanoke people in whose territory -- and by whose grace -- she existed.
Eleanor represents an unusual direction in colonial America, a chance to imagine an America evolving from a place of understanding and cooperation between the races, rather than exploitation by white colonists. In Weroansqua, what is "lost" by the survivors of the Lost Colony is their exclusive Englishness; what is gained is an expanded humanity. Even in the traumatic wake of a massacre, Eleanor never lost faith in her true friends, the Chowanoke "savages," as she identified them for "any Englishman" who might read her account. In fact, she placed the hope of the remaining colonists in their hands. And if the stories of Native peoples are true, as I believe they are, then Eleanor's hope was not in vain, and her people lived. |
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