Powhatan History

The first permanent European settlement, in 1607, was English. English colonies were agricultural, having little of the French emphasis on trading or the Spanish one on mining, militarism and missionizing. The Virginia Indians were therefore soon embroiled in a competition for space -- one which they lost gradually as more Englishmen and Africans came. Although there was fighting at times, the Indians were not so much conquered militarily as as they were flooded out.

Virginia was a "slave" state before the Civil War and a "Jim Crow" state after it. Indian tribes were neither "superior" whites nor "subservient" blacks. Their anomalous position kept them under continual fire until the Civil Rights Era. Everyone seemed to want them to disappear. In 1792 the Nansemonds sold their reservation. The Nottoway and Gingaskin reservations were terminated soon after -- the Gingaskin being the first true termination in the U.S. (1813). The Pamunkeys/Mattaponis nearly lost their land and tribal status in the 1840's. The "citizen" Indians lay low for most of the period. When anthropologists James Mooney and Frank Speck began working in Virginia (1890's-1920's), some groups reconstituted themselves in a way that was legal and hard for hostile non-Indians to obstruct: they organized as chartered corporations (Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock).

The two surviving reservations have always had recognition from the state, though not the federal government since their treaty (dated 1677) is with the Colony of Virginia. They have mixed feelings about federal recognition now that they can get it. The incorporated "citizen" tribes won through to state recognition in 1983, inspiring the Nansemond families to organize and gain recognition the next year. The Siouan-descended Amherst County Indians followed suit, though more slowly, taking the name of some of their probable ancestors, the Monacan. However, further advance to federal recognition is problematic for the "citizen" groups, due to the scarcity of records kept about non-reservation Indians and the burning of many Virginia archives during the Civil War. Meanwhile, all the groups benefit from the federal funds for education and community development that are available today. They are more prosperous now than they have been since the aliens came.

Powhatan

by John White

By Dr. Helen C. Rountree