Warren’s Heritage: Native American History-Part 1

The Spanish mission to the Chesapeake Bay — an attempt to convert Native Americans and extend their colonization of the eastern seaboard — had ended in a massacre of the mission in 1571. The English claim to North America was as of yet not enforced by a presence on the ground, and the Spanish were preparing for war with the English. Native Americans throughout Virginia and the southeast had learned to be wary of and even hostile towards Europeans, having suffered disease and attack at the hands of early explorers.

This is the environment into which Sir Walter Raleigh’s famous Roanoke Island settlement attempts were made in the 1580s. A part of England’s Virginia claim in the 1500s, Roanoke Island is today in North Carolina, and has come to be known throughout American history as the “Lost Colony” (one of the colony’s internal explorative expeditions came by river into what is now  Southside Virginia around 1580). Raleigh’s agents demanded the Native peoples supply their colony with food and sometimes killed Native leaders as a means of intimidating surrounding villages.

When the Spanish Armada’s attempted invasion of England stalled Raleigh’s resupply efforts for almost two years, the colonists were never seen or heard from again. After the 1607 founding of Jamestown an attempt was made to locate these people, but it was unsuccessful except in leaving the impression that the colonists had disbanded and the survivors intermarried with the area’s Native peoples.

1607 was a watershed year for Native peoples of Virginia and the southeast, as the small contingent of Europeans that made their way to the Chesapeake Bay stayed on permanently this time despite dying off in large numbers annually from malaria, malnutrition and warfare. Virginia the colony began to grow irrevocably into the lands of Virginia’s Native population, who coped in a variety of ways. One method of coping was to fight. The Algonquian speaking Powhatan Confederacy under Chiefs Powhatan and later Opechancanough famously made war on the English, then peace, then war — and the English responded in kind, sometimes expanding their relations peaceably, sometimes through burning Powhatan villages. The Powhatan under Opechancanough on March 22, 1622 attacked the colonists in Virginia, killing at least 10% of the entire settler population in one day, but the English kept immigrating and the conflict’s resolution became a matter of time, as every year more and more people streamed into Virginia from Europe and Africa.

Other methods of coping with the colonization of their homelands were for Native peoples to acculturate to the new language and ways of the settler, or to remove themselves physically and attempt to find shelter farther west from colonial expansion. By the former method, many Native peoples became part of the general population, forming communities isolated from other Virginians (this generally occurred along the colony’s borderlands, such as with the Occoneechi, Saponi and Nansemond who lived and still live between Virginia and North Carolina and the Shawnee who came to settle briefly in the Shenandoah Valley) or intermarrying within colonial society.

By the mid-1700s Native peoples in Virginia east of the Blue Ridge were almost entirely English-speaking, had adopted the farmstead in place of the village, become Protestant Christians of one denomination or anther (usually Baptist or Methodist), dressed as the English colonists and were generally indistinguishable from them except for their physical appearance. By the latter method, many of Virginia’s Native peoples pushed on into the mountains of what is now West Virginia (where the Melungeon heritage, as Appalachian communities of Native American ancestry have become known, still has a very strong presence today), the Shawnee withdrawing to Indiana by the 1760s and the Cherokee to Tennessee by the 1790s.

By the mid to late 1600s the Powhatan villages were generally making a reluctant peace and permanent accommodation with the colonists. Into our collective past went the story of Powhatan’s famous daughter Pocahontas, whose life experiences have become an important part of Virginia history. Today two descendant groups of the Powhatan Confederacy occupy reservations in Virginia — the Mattaponi and Pamunkey of King William County (located in Tidewater, Virginia, an hour east of Richmond). Recognized by Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1658, these are the oldest Indian Reservations in what has become the United States. Whereas the “Praying Towns” created by the New England colonists for the purpose of converting the Native peoples of that area were similar in that they confined certain groups of people to certain lands, Praying Towns were small villages without political independence.

The Mattaponi and Pamunkey, however, have since 1646 upheld a treaty with the governor of Virginia in order to maintain their ancestral lands. On the fourth Wednesday of every November (for 349 years by 2005) the Mattaponi and Pamunkey present wild game as gifts to the governor of Virginia — and if this ceremony sounds familiar it is worth remembering that Virginia experienced the first official celebration of Thanksgiving, well before New Englanders began making this a habit.