Powhatan

An ALGonquiAN-speaking chiefdom located in the present-day Chesapeake Bay area, the Powhatan had built an empire that controlled the region before the arrival of the English in 1607 at Jamestown, and through their interactions with the English, they became a cornerstone of the folklore and popular history surrounding the English colonies in North America.

At the time of contact with Europeans, the Powhatan occupied the fertile coastal plain to the west of what is today Chesapeake Bay. The forests of the region provided abundant game, which they hunted primarily in the late fall and winter and food plants such as nuts, berries, and roots. The bay also provided a rich supply of aquatic resources. The Powhatan practiced intensive maize, beans, squash, and tobacco horticulture using the slash-and-burn technique to clear land. They lived in semisedentary villages with significant populations located near rivers and streams. Powhatan homes were multiple family lodges built of bark or reeds and rectangular in shape, with curved roofs.

In the era before the arrival of the English in the region, Wahunsonacock, called Powhatan by the English, had conquered a succession of 30 ethnically and culturally related local chiefdoms and forged a paramount chiefdom on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, with a total population of approximately 15,000 people living in 200 towns. Wahunsonacock received tribute from subject towns in the form of shell beads, deerskins, and food. Local groups conquered by Wahunsonacock kept their tribal names, but the chiefdom as a whole was referred to as Tsenacomocco. The English began the practice of calling the people and their leader by the name of Powhatan. The chiefdom had a polytheistic religious structure whose complexity reflected the amalgamation of different identities within the paramount chiefdom. At the time of contact, Wahunsonacock’s empire faced a constant challenge from hostile, ethnically different groups west of the fall line in Virginia; other Algonquian chiefdoms such as the Piscataway and the Roanoac contested its position of prestige in the tidewater region. Although these Native groups posed a serious threat to the Powhatan, the arrival of the English ultimately caused the final collapse of this chiefdom by the mid-17th century. Despite the conflicts, some of this group’s descendants still live in the area of the Chesapeake Bay and retain their identity and some aspects of the aboriginal culture.

Further reading: J. Frederick Fauz, “Pattern of Anglo-Indian Aggression and Accommodation along the MidAtlantic Coast, 1584-1634,” in Cultures in Contact: The l-mpact of European Contacts on Native American Cultural Institutions, a. d. 100-1800 (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 225-270; Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Helen C. Rountree, ed., Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500-1722 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993).

—Dixie Ray Haggard