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Powhatan Confederacy

 
US History Encyclopedia: Powhatan Confederacy
 
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Powhatan Confederacy, a paramount chiefdom in the coastal plain of Virginia, named for its leader at the time of English colonization. Powhatan had inherited the leadership of a group of six tribes in the sixteenth century and expanded his authority to more than thirty tribes by 1607. Much of this expansion was by conquest. The Powhatans had a system of dual leadership with a "peace chief" responsible for internal affairs and a "war chief" for external affairs, including warfare. There was also a powerful council, which included priests and other advisers. Powhatan led the confederacy from before 1607 to 1617; after that the war chief Opechancanough was most visible, although a brother, Itoyatin, succeeded Powhatan as peace chief.

The region of the Powhatan Confederacy was called Tsenacommacah. Its core lay in the area between the James and Mattaponi Rivers in the inner coastal plain; other territories, each with its own chief and villages, were predominantly east of this area. All of these constituent chiefdoms paid tribute to Powhatan as paramount chief. To the north and south were other groups not part of the confederacy but culturally and linguistically similar. The geographic fall line running through modern Richmond, Virginia, constituted a western boundary across which were other groups speaking different languages; relatively little is known of those people.

The Powhatans lived in villages, many fortified, that could have over a thousand inhabitants, although most were a few hundred or smaller. The daily lives of villagers included farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering wild resources. Paralleling their political organization, Powhatan cosmology featured two powerful deities and a number of lesser spiritual powers. Powhatan males bonded with these manitus through the huskanaw, a vision-quest ritual, and their lives were shaped by the particular manitu with whom they shared a personal connection. Chiefs, priests, and curers had access to the most powerful manitus, but most Powhatans could personally draw on the spiritual realm; women had an innate spirituality related to their reproductive capacity.

The Powhatans were vital to the English Virginia colony in its early years. Cultural differences precluded understanding, and each saw the other as inferior, but for some years the Jamestown colony survived on food traded (or stolen) from the Powhatans. In the winter of 1607–1608, Powhatan attempted to adopt the English colony through the well-known ritual in which Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas symbolically saved Captain John Smith; in October 1608, the English tried to crown Powhatan as subordinate to their king.

Although the Powhatans tolerated the English for their desirable goods, throughout the first half of the seventeenth century they had to attempt violent corrections for what they saw as inappropriate actions by the colonists. The colonists also responded with violence to what they considered inappropriate actions by the Powhatans. The marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe in 1614 brought a measure of peace to the area, but Pocahontas died in early 1617 while visiting England. Led by Opechancanough, the Powhatans conducted large-scale attacks on the colony in 1622 and again in 1644; after the latter, Opechancanough was captured and killed. The 1646 treaty was signed by "king of the Indians" Necotowance, but by then Virginia was firmly controlled by the English and the Powhatans were dependent "tributary Indians" confined to designated reservations.

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, descendants of the Powhatan Indians remained in eastern Virginia, but they were relatively invisible—except for the descendants of Pocahontas, who were a proud part of white society. In the late nineteenth century, the Powhatans began the long struggle for recognition. The anthropologist Frank Speck promoted their cause beginning in 1919, and opposed racist policies directed against them. He aided a revival of the "Powhatan Confederacy" in the 1920s; another was attempted around 1970. While these reorganized confederacies did not last, individual tribes continued both on the two surviving reservations and in several other communities. Although they lacked federal recognition in the twenty-first century, most were recognized by the state of Virginia.

Bibliography

Gleach, Frederic W. Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Rountree, Helen C. The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

———. Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Speck, Frank G. Chapters on the Ethnology of the Powhatan Tribes of Virginia. New York: Heye Foundation, 1928.

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Columbia Encyclopedia: Powhatan Confederacy
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Powhatan Confederacy, group of Native North Americans belonging to the Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock (see Native American languages). Their area embraced most of tidewater Virginia and the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. Wahunsonacock, or Powhatan, as the English called him, was the leader of the confederacy when Jamestown was settled in 1607. The Powhatan are said to have been driven N to Virginia by the Spanish, where their chief, Powhatan's father, subjugated five other Virginia tribes. With Powhatan's own conquests, the empire included, among some 30 peoples, the Pamunkey, Mattapony, Chickahominy, and others likewise commemorated in the names of the streams and rivers of E Virginia. They were a sedentary people, with some 200 settlements, many of them protected by palisades when the English arrived. They cultivated corn, fished, and hunted. Of his many capitals, Powhatan favored Werowocomoco, on the left bank of the York River near modern Purtan Bay, where Capt. John Smith first met him in 1608. The English soon seized the best lands, and Powhatan quickly retaliated. To appease him, he was given a crown, and a coronation ceremony was formally performed by Christopher Newport in 1609. Peace with Powhatan was secured when his daughter Pocahontas married (1614) John Rolfe.

On Powhatan's death in 1618, Opechancanough, chief of the Pamunkey, became the central power in the confederacy, and he organized the general attack (1622) in which some 350 settlers were killed. English reprisals were equally violent, but there was no further fighting on a large scale until 1644, when Opechancanough led the last uprising, in which he was captured and murdered at Jamestown. In 1646 the confederacy yielded much of its territory, and beginning in 1665 its chiefs were appointed by the governor of Virginia. After the Iroquois, traditional enemies of the confederacy, agreed to cease their attacks in the Treaty of Albany (1722), the tribes scattered, mixed with the settlers, and all semblance of the confederacy disappeared. In 1990 there were about 800 Powhatan in the United States, most of them in E Virginia.

Bibliography

See F. G. Speck, Chapters on the Ethnology of the Powhatan Tribes of Virginia (1928).

 
Wikipedia: Powhatan
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This article is about the Algonquian tribe. For other uses, see Powhatan (disambiguation).
Chief Powhatan in a longhouse at Werowocomoco (detail of John Smith map, 1612)
Flag of Powhatan Renape

The Powhatan (also spelled Powatan and Powhaten), or Powhatan Renape[1] (literally, the "Powhatan Human Beings"), is the name of a Native American tribe. It is also the name of a powerful confederacy of tribes which they dominated.

Also known as Virginia Algonquians, they spoke an eastern-Algonquian language known as Powhatan. They lived in what is now the eastern part of Virginia at the time of the first European-Native encounters there. The name is believed to have originated from a village near the head of navigation on a major river, each of which was also called "Powhatan."

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a weroance named Wahunsunacock created a mighty empire by conquering or affiliating by agreement with around 30 tribes covering much of eastern Virginia, called Tsenacommacah ("densely-inhabited Land"),[2] He was known as Powhatan. Beginning with the arrival of English settlers at Jamestown in 1607, encroachment of the new arrivals, and their ever-growing numbers on what had been Indian lands, resulted in conflicts that became almost continuous for the next 37 years.

After Wahunsunacock's death in 1618, hostilities escalated under the chiefdom of his brother, Opechancanough, who sought in vain to drive the Europeans away, leading the Indian Attack of 1622 and another in 1644. These attempts saw strong reprisals from the English, ultimately resulting in the near elimination of the tribe. The Powhatan Confederacy had been largely destroyed by 1646 after the capture and death of Opechancanough. As the colonial expansion continued, the Europeans were joined by growing numbers of African Americans, some of whom earned their freedom after serving as indentured servants, particularly in the period up to the mid-17th century.

Among the changes made by Nathaniel Bacon during Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 was the practice of enslaving captive Indians. Indian slavery was again officially abolished by the House of Burgesses in 1691, only fifteen years later; however, many Powhatan continued under conditions of slave-like servitude well into the 18th century.[3] Some remnant Powhatan assimilated into the colonial populations of persons of European and African origin.

In the 21st century, descendants in Virginia include seven recognized tribes recognized by the state as having ties with the original Powhatan confederacy.[4] The Pamunkey and the Mattaponi tribes have reservations in King William County, Virginia.

Years after the Powhatan Confederacy no longer existed, and some miles to the west of its area, Powhatan County in the Virginia Colony was named in honor of Chief Wahunsunacock, the father of Pocahontas.

Although the cultures of the Powhatan and the European settlers were very different, through the union of Pocahontas and English settler John Rolfe and their son Thomas Rolfe, many descendants of First Families of Virginia can trace back to both Native American and European roots.

Contents

History

Source of name

The name "Powhatan" is believed to have originated as the name of the village or "town" that Wahunsunacock (who has become better-known as the Chief Powhatan) came from. It was located in the East End portion of the modern-day city of Richmond, Virginia). "Powhatan" was also the name used by the natives to refer to the river where the town sat at the head of navigation (today called the James River, renamed by the English colonists for their own king, James I).

"Powhatan" is a Virginia Algonquian word with an uncertain meaning: Po- or Pau- or Pow- + hatan. The ending of the word -hatan deals with outcrop of rocks, near the falls of the James River. A similar version of the word can be found in Manhattan, where -hatan refers to the craggy formation along the western portion of the island. The settlement of Powhatan was at the falls of the James River.[5]

Powhatan Hill in eastern Henrico County is in the general vicinity of the Native American village. Powhatan County and its county seat at Powhatan, Virginia were honorific names established years later in locations west of the area populated by the Powhatan Confederacy.

Building the Powhatan Confederacy

Wahunsunacock had inherited control over just six tribes, but dominated over thirty by the time the English settlers established their Virginia Colony at Jamestown in 1607. The original six constituent tribes in Wahunsunacock's Powhatan Confederacy were: the Powhatans (proper), the Arrohatecks, the Appamattucks, the Pamunkeys, the Mattaponis, and the Chiskiacks.

He added the Kecoughtans to his fold by 1598. Some other affiliated groups included the Youghtanunds, Rappahannocks, Moraughtacunds, Weyanoaks, Paspaheghs, Quiyoughcohannocks, Warraskoyacks, and Nansemonds. Yet another closely related tribe in the midst of these others, all speaking the same language, was the Chickahominy, who managed to preserve their autonomy from the confederacy.

In his famous work Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-82), Thomas Jefferson estimated that the Powhatan Confederacy occupied about eight thousand square miles of territory, with a population of about eight thousand people, of whom twenty-four hundred were warriors. [6]

The English settlers in the land of the Powhatan

The Powhatan Confederacy is famous as those Indians among whom the first permanent English settlement in North America was made. This was also to be the downfall of the Native American empire. Conflicts began immediately; shots were fired the instant the colonists arrived (due to a bad experience they had with the Spanish prior to their arrival). Within two weeks of the English arrival at Jamestown, deaths had occurred.

The settlers had hoped for friendly relations and had planned to trade with the Native Americans for food. Captain Christopher Newport led the first English exploration party up the James River in 1607 and first met Parahunt, weroance of the Powhatan proper - whom they initially mistook for the paramount Chief Powhatan, Wahunsunacawh.

Opechancanough

On a hunting and trade mission on the Chickahominy River in December 1607, Captain John Smith, later president of the colony, was captured by Opechancanough, the younger brother of Wahunsunacawh. Smith became the first to meet the paramount chief. According to Smith's account, Pocahontas, Wahunsunacawh's daughter, prevented her father from executing Smith.

Some researchers have asserted that a mock execution was a ritual intended to adopt Smith into the tribe, but other modern writers dispute this interpretation. They point out that nothing is known of seventeenth-century Powhatan adoption ceremonies, and that this sort of ritual is different from known rites of passage. Other historians, such as Helen Rountree, have questioned whether the event occurred at all. They note that Smith failed to mention it in his 1608 and 1612 accounts, and only added it to his 1624 memoir, after Pocahontas had become famous.

Newport crowned the paramount Chief with a ceremonial crown and presented him with many European gifts to gain the Indians' friendship. Newport realized that Powhatan's friendship was crucial to the survival of the small Jamestown colony.

After John Smith had become president, he sent a force under Captain Martin which occupied an island in Nansemond territory, driving the inhabitants away. At the same time, he sent another force with Francis West to build a fort at the falls, then purchased the nearby fortified Powhatan village (present site of Richmond, Virginia) from Parahunt for some copper and an Englishman named Henry Spelman, who wrote a rare first-hand account of the Powhatan ways of life. Smith then renamed the village "Nonsuch", and tried to get West's men to live in it. Both these attempts at settling beyond Jamestown soon failed, due to Powhatan resistance,. Smith left Virginia for England in October 1609, never to return, because of an injury sustained in a gunpowder accident. A second English fort, Fort Algernon, was established soon afterward in Kecoughtan territory.

In November 1609, Captain John Ratcliffe was invited to Orapakes, Powhatan's new capital. When he sailed up the Pamunkey River to trade there, a fight broke out between the colonists and the Powhatans. All of the English ashore were killed, including Ratcliffe, who was tortured by the women of the tribe. Those aboard the pinnace escaped and told the tale at Jamestown.

During the next year, the tribe attacked and killed many Jamestown residents. The residents fought back, but only killed twenty. However, arrival at Jamestown of a new Governor, Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, (Lord Delaware) in June of 1610 signalled the beginning of the First Anglo-Powhatan War. A brief period of peace only came after the capture of Pocahontas, her baptism, and her marriage to tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614.

However, within a few years both the Chief and Pocahontas were dead from disease. The Chief died in Virginia, but Pocahontas died while in England. Meanwhile, the English settlers continued to encroach on Powhatan territory.

After Wahunsunacawh's death, his younger brother, Opitchapam, briefly became chief, followed by their younger brother Opechancanough, who in 1622 and 1644 attempted to force the English from Powhatan territories. Both these attempts saw strong reprisals from the English, ultimately resulting in the near destruction of the tribe. The Second Anglo–Powhatan War that followed the 1644 incident ended in 1646 after Royal Governor of Virginia William Berkeley's forces captured Opechancanough, thought to be between 90 and 100 years old. While a prisoner, Opechancanough was killed, shot in the back, by a soldier assigned to guard him. He was succeeded as Weroance by Necotowance, and later by Totopotomoi and by his daughter Cockacoeske.

Red line shows boundary between the Virginia Colony and Tributary Indian tribes, as established by the Treaty of 1646. Red dot shows Jamestown, capital of Virginia Colony.

The Treaty of 1646 ending this conflict marked the effective dissolution of the united confederacy, as white colonists were granted an exclusive enclave between the York and Blackwater Rivers, physically separating the Nansemonds, Weyanokes and Appomattox, who retreated southward, from the other Powhatan tribes now occupying the Middle Peninsula and Northern Neck. While the southern frontier demarcated in 1646 was respected for the remainder of the 17th century, the northern one was lifted by the House of Burgesses on September 1, 1649. Waves of new immigrants quickly thereafter flooded the peninsular region, then known as Chickacoan, restricting the dwindling tribes to ever more dwindling tracts of land that became among the earliest reservations.

By 1665, the Powhatan were subject to stringent laws enacted that year, which compelled them to accept chiefs appointed by the governor. After the Treaty of Albany in 1684, the Powhatan Confederacy all but vanished.

Capitals of the Powhatan Confederacy

Besides the capital village of "Powhatan" in the Powhatan Hill section of the eastern part of the current city of Richmond, another capital of this confederacy about 75 miles (121 km) to the east was called Werowocomoco. It was located near the north bank of the York River in present-day Gloucester County.

Werowocomoco was described by the English colonists as only 15 miles (24 km) as the crow flies from Jamestown, but also described as 25 miles (40 km) downstream from present-day West Point, measurements which are in conflict with each other. Therefore, the long-lost location of Werowocomoco is in some dispute. Long thought to have been near Wicomico, near Gloucester Point, roughly 25 miles (40 km) downstream from West Point, substantial archaeological evidence discovered in the early 21st century locates the site on Purtan Bay, about 12 air miles from Jamestown, but much less than 25 miles (40 km) below West Point.

For more details on this topic, see Werowocomoco.

Around 1609, Wahunsunacock shifted his capital from Werowocomoco to Orapakes, located in a swamp at the head of the Chickahominy River, near the modern-day interchange of Interstate 64 and Interstate 295. Sometime between 1611 and 1614, he moved further north to Matchut, in present-day King William County on the north bank of the Pamunkey River, not far from where his brother Opechancanough ruled at Youghtanund.

Characteristics

The Powhatan lived east of the fall line in Tidewater Virginia. They built their houses, called yehakins, by bending saplings and placing woven mats or bark over top of the saplings. They supported themselves primarily by growing crops, especially maize, but they also fished and hunted in the great forest in their area. Villages consisted of a number of related families organized in tribes that were led by a king or queen, who was a client of the Emperor and a member of his council.

According to research by the National Park Service, Powhatan "men were warriors and hunters, while women were gardeners and gatherers. The English described the men, who ran and walked extensively through the woods in pursuit of enemies or game, as tall and lean and possessed of handsome physiques. The women were shorter, and were strong because of the hours they spent tending crops, pounding corn into meal, gathering nuts, and performing other domestic chores. When the men undertook extended hunts, the women went ahead of them to construct hunting camps. The Powhatan domestic economy depended on the labor of both sexes." [7]

All of Virginia's natives practiced agriculture. They periodically moved their villages from site to site. Villagers cleared the fields by felling, girdling, or firing trees at the base and then using fire to reduce the slash and stumps. A village gradually became untenable as soil productivity gradually declined and local fish and game were depleted. The inhabitants then moved on. With every change in location, a village used fire to clear new land and left an even larger amount of cleared land behind. The natives also used fire to maintain extensive areas of open game habitat throughout the East, later called "barrens" by European colonists. The Powhatan also had rich fishing grounds. Bison had arrived to this area by the early 15th century.[8]

Powhatan today

There are seven state recognized Powhatan Indian descended tribes in Virginia as of 2009. Of these recognized tribes approximately 2,500-3,000 are tribal members.[9] It is estimated that 3 to 4 times that number are eligible for tribal membership.[10] Two of these tribes still maintain their reservations from the 1600s, the Mattaponi and Pamunkey, found in King William County, Virginia. The Powhatan language is now dormant. Attempts have been made to reconstruct the vocabulary of the language; some of the sources are word lists provided by Smith and by William Strachey.

Powhatan County was named in honor of the Chief and his tribe, although located about 60 miles (97 km) to the west of lands ever under their control. In the independent city of Richmond, Tree Hill Farm in the city's east end is traditionally believed to be located near the village Chief Powhatan was originally from, although the specific location of the site is unknown.

Since the 1990s the Powhatan Indian tribes that have state recognition, along with the one other Virginia Indian tribe that is state recognized, have been seeking federal recognition. It has been a difficult process mostly since they are unable to get the recognition through the normal channel of the Bureau of Indian Affairs because of Walter Plecker's "paper genocide" during the 1900s while head of Vital Statistics in Virginia. Plecker was a white supremacist and a follower of the eugenics movement and thought that there were no real Virginia Indians left. While head of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946 he set out to document this view by only using the terms "white" or "colored" on official documents such as birth, death and marriage certificates, tax documents, etc. After the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was passed Plecker's job was easier. The other issue that arose once they began trying to get the recognition through an act of Congress has been a fear that the tribes will open up casinos-something the tribal leaders have said they have zero interest in.

In March of 2009 five of the state recognized Powhatan Indian tribes and the one other state recognized Virginia Indian tribe introduced the bill again to try to gain federal recognition through an Act of Congress. The Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act went first to the House Committee on Natural Resources. The Committee voted on April 22 to pass the bill on the the US House of Representatives who approved the bill on June 3. On June 4, 2009 the bill was sent to the Senate who read it twice and referred it to their Committee on Indian Affairs. This is where the bill is as of July 16, 2009 and is the farthest the bill has ever gotten. The bill has a section forbidding the tribes from ever opening up casinos, even if casions were to be allowed in Virginia.[11]

Powhatan and film

The American entertainer Wayne Newton is of mixed Powhatan [Potomac], Cherokee, Irish, and German ancestry.

The Powhatan people are featured in the Disney animated film Pocahontas (1995). An attempt at a more historically accurate representation of them appears in The New World (2005).

Some of the current members of the Powhatan decended tribes have complained against the workings of Walt Disney, claiming that the Disney movie "distorts history beyond recognition," quoted from Chief Roy Crazy Horse, a Powhatan descendant.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The word "Renape", which means human[1], is cognate with Lenape, the name of another Algonquian-speaking tribe of what is now New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
  2. ^ http://www.wm.edu/niahd/journals/index.php?browse=entry&id=4965 c.f. Anishinaabe language: danakamigaa: "activity-grounds", i.e. "land of much events [for the People]"
  3. ^ Rountree 1990
  4. ^ Matchut
  5. ^ Powhatan Indian Chiefs and Leaders
  6. ^ http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefVirg.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all
  7. ^ The Chesapeake Bay Region and its People in 1607
  8. ^ Brown, Hutch (Summer 2000). "Wildland Burning by American Indians in Virginia". Fire Management Today (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service) 60 (3): 30–33. 
  9. ^ Kimberlain, Joanne. "We're Still Here." The Virginian-Pilot, June 7-9 2009.
  10. ^ Rountree, Helen C. and E. Randolph Turner III. Before and After Jamestown: Virginia's Powhatans and Their Predecessors. University Press of Florida, 2002.
  11. ^ H.R. 1385: Thomasina E. Jordan Indian tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2009, http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-1385

Further reading

  • Gleach, Frederic W. (1997) Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
  • Gleach, Frederic W. (2006) Pocahontas: An Exercise in Mythmaking and Marketing." In: New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations, ed. by Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, pp. 433-455. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
  • Karen Kupperman, Settling With the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640, 1980
  • A. Bryant Nichols Jr., Captain Christopher Newport: Admiral of Virginia, Sea Venture, 2007
  • James Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson, 2009.
  • Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries, 1990

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