I recently read an article that there is evidence suggesting that the Roanoke Colony simply just assimilated into the nearby tribe, but whenever I have watched documentaries, read about the Lost Colony, or learned about it in school, the theories are always much more deadly (disease, murder, and so on). I have only seen this idea suggested in the past decade. There was no evidence of brutality or a reason for them to leave, and it's completely logical that they would end up with the people who knew the land they were on and how to survive off of it. Was it just the assumption that colonists would have never tried to get along with the Native Americans?
Subjective answer: yes, I definitely remember Croatoan and living with Native peoples as a possibility in books and educational videos in the late 1990s.
Actual answer:
In the Lost Colony episode of In Search Of.... from 1982, theories are raised that Roanoke colonists lived with Native peoples of Hatteras area, or moved north and lived with Native peoples in what is now Virginia and at some point between 1585 and 1608 were massacred in inter-tribe violence.
The book Roanoke, the Abandoned Colony devotes chapter 9 to covering the claim of the Lumbee tribe that the Roanoke colonists integrated with their ancestors, and modern Lumbee are Roanoke descendants.
This idea that the Lumbee are Roanoke descendants was also covered in 1996 in The Only Land I know; a history of the Lumbee indians. Dial and Eliades also make clear that early colonists at Jamestown believed it a possibility Roanoke colonists lived with Native peoples, because surviving journals have stories about Native tribes that speak English and are familiar with the concept that English knew reading and writing.
The theory was popular enough that in 2006 undergraduate essays at UC Davis explored the possibility that Lumbee are partly descended from Roanoke colonists.