Warren’s Heritage: Native American History-Part 10

The month we’ll recall the long record of Virginia’s past that predates the settlement of Jamestown — an event which will dominate discussions of all things historical throughout 2007 here in  Virginia.

The history of the Commonwealth of Virginia is a long and storied one. One of the Old Dominion’s other nicknames, “Mother of the Colonies,” reminds us that when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock they were settling lands still a part of Virginia. As we approach the four hundred year anniversary of the founding of Virginia, what, then, could augment this long and fascinating story even more? The answer lies in the history of those who stood at the shores of Virginia before it was known by that name, and watched and greeted the arriving settlers. The Native American peoples of Virginia, as all Native Americans, would become a part of the fabric of America’s history, their presence upon the land that was once theirs alone still echoes in the names of countless rivers and streams, mountains and valleys.

The colonial settlers of Virginia and Native peoples of Virginia had complex relations from the beginning of recorded history. Very often blood was shed, the Powhatan Confederacy alone
fighting three wars with the encroaching colonists in an attempt to maintain their lands, their sovereignty, and their way of life. Treaties were drafted between these two groups — sometimes honored, often ignored. The ever-increasing stream of colonists and the agricultural and urban infrastructures they created, in addition to the diseases that arrived with them from the Old World, meant that by the settlement of the Shenandoah Valley in the late 1720s colonists found the Great Valley all but devoid of a Native presence. Some settlers assumed that the Valley had never been occupied before, but this was a misleading and incorrect assumption, as the Native American presence in Warren County and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia was ancient, and had only been disrupted shortly prior to settlement of The Valley.

The Native Americans of the area of North America that would become modern-day Virginia spoke multiple dialects — often confined to individual villages or collections of villages — but that came from one of three distinct language groups: Algonquian (spoken by the Powhatan), Iroquoian (spoken by the Cherokee), and Siouan (spoken by the Monocans and Manahoacs, the two tribes that lived closest to and in the Shenandoah Valley in the 1600s). The area that is now Virginia was part of the Eastern Woodlands cultural zone in North America, the trademarks of which by the 1500s included corn and bean agriculture, hunting, fishing, trapping and stable village life (village sites being permanent or semi-permanent within a given area of control). Native peoples in the eastern woodlands cultivated tobacco for ritual use, had elaborate and complex political, social, artistic and spiritual lives, and were far from the “savages” that Europeans would often see and portray them as being. They built permanent ceremonial centers and established trade networks that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Their ways of life before the European colonization did make some serious changes to the continent; for instance, by the 1500s most large animal species living in eastern North America had been made extinct through over-hunting.

In the late 1400s explorers following the lead of Christopher Columbus traveled along the eastern seaboard of North America, mapping the continent and beginning a tradition that would last a century of farther exploration and of European fishing vessels coming to fish the waters of eastern North America without establishing permanent settlements. By the late 1500s, however, this had changed in two dramatic ways. The first serious incursion into the Southeast occurred with the expedition of Spanish conquistador Hernando De Soto, who led a small army from Florida though what is now the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas (some historians feel the route could have come all the way north into Virginia).

This expedition exposed Native Americans in the Southeast to many diseases to which they had never before been exposed, including smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, typhus and influenza. Archaeologists working on the remains of village sites from this period of first contact routinely discover the death rate from these new diseases to be around 90%, with most victims dying within a few weeks’ time of initial infection (this would be the modern-day equivalent of Virginia’s current population of over seven million people being reduced to a few hundred thousand). The De Soto expedition brought violent contact between colonists and Native Americans to the Southeast as well. De Soto regularly ordered his attack dogs to maul captive Native Americans to death in order to frighten local populations, and took hostages to guarantee his group’s safe passage through North America’s interior.

The results from expeditions such as these were twofold; first, Native peoples had to reorganize their devastated communities that had been so reduced in population that many villages were abandoned and whole groups of people were displaced from their ancestral homes, and second, Native peoples of the southeast became very wary and defensive of European explorers in general. It is no wonder given this early contact that when the Spanish built a mission in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay in 1570 that it lasted only one year before the entire mission was slaughtered.

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, but the English claim to North America as of yet also lacked a presence on the ground, and the Spanish were preparing for war with the English 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 in American history as the “Lost Colony” (one of the colony’s internal explorative expeditions came by river into what is now Southside Virginia around 1581). 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 giving 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 making their contacts 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 another, 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.