The Powhatan of Virginia

Tribe: The Powhatan.  They and other Native American tribes have lived in Virginia since 15,000 BC.  In the late 1500's AD, a Powhatan Chief named Wahunsenacawh formed a Confederacy (more like an Empire) of more than thirty smaller chiefdoms. The chiefs of these smaller chiefdoms paid an annual tribute in the form of fish and game to Chief Wahunsenacawh as "The Mamanatowick," the Supreme Chief. Now there are only seven or so remnants of the once mighty Powhatan Confederacy: The Pamunkey, the Mattaponi, the Upper Mattaponi, the Chickahominy, the Eastern Chickahominy, the Nansemond, and the Rappahanock, none of whom have federal tribal recognition. The Pamunkey and the Mattaponi, who have state recognition, still live on ancestral land, but now, instead of sending annual tribute of fish and game to the Mamanatowick, they send fish and game as annual tribute to the Governor of Virginia in accordance with treaties written in 1646 and 1677.

Meaning of Name: "Powhatan" means "Waterfall" in Algonquin.

Location: Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The main chiefdom of the Powhatan was called "Tsenacommacah," (think "Camelot,") which was where the Mamanatowick and his family lived, specifically, in a longhouse large enough to need hallways.

Original Language: Powhatan-Algonquin, a dialect of Algonquin.

Tribal Affiliations: At one time, the Powhatan Confederacy included the Powhatan proper, the
Arrohateck, the Appamattuck, the Pamunkey, the Mattaponi, the Chiskiack, the Kecoughtan, the Youghtanund, the Rapahannocks, the Morgaughtecund, the Weyenoak, the Paspahegh, the Quiyoughcohannock, the Warraskoyack, the Nansemond, the Chickahominy, the Accawmacke, and some fourteen others. These tribes joined the Powhatan Confederacy either by choice, by conquest or because they had married into Chief Wahunsenacawh's family. The Wicocomoco were also their allies.

Traditional Enemies: The Iroquois-speakers, specifically the Tuscarora, the Susquehannock, the Cherokee, the Nottoway and the Meherrin.  They also fought with the Monacan and the Manahoac, who spoke Siouan, and the British settlers who spoke English.

Traditional Style of Housing: The Powhatan lived in tall windowless longhouses, called "yehakins," of various sizes that were similar in design to those of the Iroquois, but covered in woven mats which could be removed when the weather got too hot and stuffy.  The longhouses were made by the men as part of the bride-price, and were given to and owned by the brides. Their villages were of various sizes, some as small as two longhouses, and others as large as one hundred longhouses, and were set on the high ground to guard against flooding, and enclosed in a 10-to-12-foot tall wooden palisade to guard against wild animals and other tribes. Like the Iroquois, they also had farms, orchards, sweat-lodges, smokehouses, storehouses, and probably a menstrual lodge and a longhouse that was used as a town hall.

Traditional Attire: Virginia is very humid through much of the year, so the Powhatan usually went shirtless, and otherwise wore fringed deerskin skirts and moccasins. Both men and women wore earrings and necklaces, and the men wore a headband across their foreheads with one or two feathers in it. The women wore their hair long, or in braids with bangs, or cut all the same length, and the men wore their hair long and in a knot on the left side, and shaved on the right side so that their hair wouldn't get tangled in their bowstrings. In the cold weather, they wore fur-line or turkey-feather-line blankets and mantles, and when they were in the forest, they wore leggings to protect their legs against the forest undergrowth.

Traditional Foods: The Powhatan were a settled, agrarian people who had very large fields outside of their villages.  There, the Powhatan women grew their own corn, beans, squash, gourds and pumpkins.  They also gathered or grew their own hazelnuts, filberts, black walnuts, acorns, chestnuts, sunflowers, a wild grain called "chechinquarnins," mulberries, paw paws, persimmons, huckleberries, wild grapes, muskmelon, peaches, melons, cucumbers, peas, peanuts, Indian potatoes, goosefoot for quinoa, knotweed (tastes like rhubarb), wild barley and maygrass, a kind of grain. The men hunted, netted, speared or trapped oysters, crab, scallops, clams, flounder, stingray, skate, crayfish, bear, beaver, panther, skunk, wildcats, possums, rabbits, squirrels, deer, turtles, turtle eggs, water-fowl, and turkey. Once the Europeans arrived in the early 1600's, the Powhatan added beef, mutton, lamb, and pork to their diet. The Powhatan also cultivated tobacco and hemp for making cords and ropes, smoked their meats in smokehouses in order to preserve them, and saved the surplus food in separate longhouses for the lean times.

Position of the Women: The Powhatan women were incredibly busy. They were the barbers, the farmers, the gatherers, the food-producers, the meat processors, the mat-weavers, the tanners, the cooks, the home-owners, the midwives, the herbalists, the healers, the wood-gatherers, the water-carriers, the child-raisers, the clothing manufacturers, the basket-weavers, the potters, the rope-makers, and the carvers of wooden spoons, platters, mortars and pestles. Descent was matrilineal, but unlike the Iroquois, they did not seem to have had clans, Clan Mothers or an active voice in Powhatan government, and a Powhatan husband did not need to seek his wife's permission for anything, although it was advisable since divorces were easy to get and he could soon find himself homeless. The common men weren't terribly powerful either, since the Powhatan Chief seemed to have ruled as something of a tyrant, and his word was law. The common men kept themselves busy by hunting, fishing, making dugout canoes, clearing woodland, keeping their hunting and fishing equipment repaired, playing sports and waging war.

Powhatan Courtship:

Powhatan marriages, for commoners, were of two kinds: romantic or contractual. In a romantic marriage, when a young Powhatan man was interested in a young Powhatan woman, he would bring her family a gift of food, probably fish or game. If it was accepted by her and her family, the father of the prospective bride would discuss the bride-price with the suitor. The higher the bride-price, the greater the value of the bride. As part of the bride-price, the young Powhatan man would build his beloved her own longhouse and provide those things that they would need to start their lives together: a mortar and pestle, mats, pots and bedding.  These things would be retained by his bride in the case of a divorce.  Then, when everything was completed, the bride would be brought to the groom's father's house, and the groom's father or another male relative would join their hands and they were considered married. Adultery was not uncommon, but in an interesting quirk, the wife did need her husband's permission to take a lover. 

In the Marriage by Contract, which was like the Half-Marriage of the Klamath, Modoc and the Yurok tribes on the other side of the continent, if the suitor couldn't meet the full price demanded by the bride's father, or provide the house and furnishing, her father allowed his daughter to marry him, anyway, and the groom moved into his in-laws' longhouse. This marriage was renewed on a year-to-year basis. If they stayed together and didn't renew their vows or get a divorce, their marriage was considered still in effect. This probably also gave the groom time to build his wife her house, and for her to get pregnant, since child-bearing was a large part of the reason to get married. And again, adultery was not uncommon, but the wife did need to have her husband's permission to take a lover. 

The marriage of the Powhatan Chief, the Mamanatowick, was a little different. He could marry as many women as he wanted, from any village in his domain or from neighboring tribes if he wanted to form an alliance with the other tribe's chief. Chief Wahunsenacawh, Pocahontas' father, was said to have had as many as one hundred wives. The village girl or princess was joined in marriage to the Mamanatowick, lived in his longhouse until she delivered his child, and then the mother and the child were returned to the tribe from hence she had come. For the next few years, she and the baby were fully supported by the Mamanatowick, and then, when the child had come of age, said child was taken back to the Mamanatowick to be raised in his longhouse as his son or daughter. At that time, the Chief and the mother were considered divorced and she was free to marry again. The only requirement was that she could not take any lovers until she and the Chief were formally divorced.

Interesting Tidbits:

The English were not the first Europeans whom the Powhatan had met. Their land was "claimed for Spain" by Spanish explorer Esteban Gomez in 1525. Other Spaniards followed and a few of them managed to kidnap and enslave the young son of a Powhatan chief. Jesuit missionaries established a mission called "Ajacan" in 1570 which was burned to the ground by the Powhatan who were probably tired of their attempts to exploit them, enslave them, and convert them to Catholicism by using techniques advanced during the Spanish Inquisition. 

The Powhatan bathed in the rivers in the morning, which was quite unlike the 16th Century Spanish Jesuits or the 17th Century Brits who rarely if ever bathed at all.

The Powhaitan recognized and celebrated five seasons: The Budding Season, the Earing of Corn Season, the Highest Sun Season, the Corn Harvest Season and "Cohonk," which was winter, when migrating geese made their "honking" sounds. They observed a lunar calendar and reckoned time by the sun's position: Rising, Power, and Lowering. This probably made the British a little crazy when it came to making appointments with the Powhatan.

Self-control and respect for other people were of paramount importance to the Powhatan. This led to problems with the British, because when they saw the Powhatan listening quietly to their demands, they took their silence as consent, and in reality, the Powhatan were merely being polite. The Powhatan also tended to retreat after an attack in order for their enemies to come to their senses and surrender or leave the territory, but the British tended to interpret this lull as an opportunity to counter-attack.

By the early 1700's, most of the Powhatan had died of diseases brought from by the British settlers. The population was partially increased by the addition of escaped African slaves and escaped white indentured servants whom the Powhatan welcomed into their tribe, and the end result was considerable mixing of ethnicities.  This later resulted in the 'paper genocide" of the Powhatan people, since under the Racial Integrity Law of 1924, people were classified as either "White" or "Colored" (meaning having at least one drop of African blood).  This deprived many Powhatan of their tribal heritage and benefits thereof, since they were now considered 100% black.  The birth certificates, marriage licenses, census records, and death certificates of the Powhatan and other Native American tribes were destroyed to remove all traces of Native American blood in Virginia. This meant that Native American children who lived in Virginia could not get high school diplomas, and that young Native American adults could not marry whom they wanted until the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Loving vs. Virginia in 1967.

The Powhatan added many words to the American and English vocabulary: Caucus, chipmunk, hominy, moccasin, opossum, pecan, persimmon, Powwow, raccoon and tomahawk, to name a few.

Traditional Religion: Traditional tribal religion and Christianity.

Slavery and the Powhatan:  The British, when they arrived in Virginia, followed in the footsteps of the brutal Spanish Jesuits and abused the hospitality that they were offered by the Native Americans. Captain John Smith informed his men to treat the natives badly, to compel them to drudgery, work and slavery, and to take by force that which they wanted. It is no wonder that Chief Wahunsenacawh wanted to have him executed, because after John Smith's life was saved by Pocahontas, the situation between the British and the Powhatan did not improve until she married John Rolfe, and after she died in 1617 and Chief Wahunsenacawh died in 1618, the hostilities resumed and then got worse.

As stated before, because escaped white indentured servants and escaped African slaves were welcomed on Powhatan land, there was considerable intermarriage. Unfortunately, racism was rampant, and an "Indian" was considered an "Indian" only as long as he or she were on the reservation. If they stepped off of it, or if the reservation was sold out from under them and they lost their tribal status, the Powhatan were considered "Colored" and liable to become enslaved and transported to the Deep South. Not surprisingly, the Powhatan fought on the side of the Union, probably in otherwise black companies, during the Civil War.

Current Population: There are currently over 3800 registered Powhatan.

Current Sources of Tribal Revenue: Revenue gained from renting duck blinds and duck hunting on tribal land, museums, tourism, a fish hatchery, and a winery.

Famous Powhatan: Pocahontas, the favorite daughter of Chief Wahunsenacawh, who was the  Mamanatowick of the Powhatan.  She was actually married to Englishman John Rolfe, not John Smith, Disney movie notwithstanding, but is said to have been instrumental in saving John Smith from execution when she was eleven years-old.  Her marriage at age eighteen to tobacco-planter John Rolfe was the first interracial marriage in Virginia, and possibly in the Colonies, and allowed peace to exist between the British and the Powhatan for at least three years. Her father, Chief Wahunsenacawh, gave the happy couple hundreds of acres of land as a wedding present which I believe John Rolfe turned into a tobacco plantation.