Mattawoman Erotic

The Mattawoman were an Algonquian-speaking people of the Maryland shore of the Potomac, living along the creek that still carries their name in present-day Charles County from before English contact in 1608 until the 1680s, when raids and colonial pressure broke up their town. The survivors merged into the Piscataway, whose descendants in southern Maryland carry the line today.

John Smith mapped their town as Mataughquamend, usually glossed as "where one goes pleasantly." It was one of a string of river towns answering to the Piscataway tayac, the paramount chief on the Maryland side of the Potomac. The Mattawoman had their own werowance and their own ground: a slow tidal creek thick with spawning fish, marsh full of tuckahoe and waterfowl, and enough bottomland for corn, beans and squash. Houses were bent-sapling frames covered in bark or reed mats. Their speech was a dialect of Piscataway, an Eastern Algonquian language close to Nanticoke across the bay and kin to the Powhatan spoken over the river in Virginia. It survives in little more than a Jesuit's handwritten prayers and a scatter of place names.

Maryland's founding in 1634 put them in the path of a colony that wanted exactly the land they farmed. Jesuit missionaries worked the Potomac towns through the 1640s, and Catholicism took a lasting hold among the Piscataway peoples alongside older belief. In 1666 the Mattawoman were among the dozen nations that signed Articles of Peace and Amity with the proprietary government. The treaty promised protected land and in practice fenced them into it, on a reservation laid out between Mattawoman and Piscataway creeks while planters' cattle and hogs wrecked the cornfields. It also made them English allies, which made them targets. Susquehannock and Iroquois war parties struck south in the years after 1675, and a raid around 1681 carried off most of the Mattawoman town. Those who got away sheltered with the Piscataway at the fort in Zekiah Swamp.

After that the Mattawoman fade from the colony's records as a separate nation. Part of the combined Piscataway left Maryland in the 1690s, moving up the Potomac and eventually into Pennsylvania under Iroquois protection, where they were known as the Conoy. Others never left. Families stayed on in the back country of Charles and Prince George's counties, held together by kinship and parish, and Maryland recognized their descendants in 2012 as the Piscataway Indian Nation and the Piscataway Conoy Tribe. The name itself is still in daily use. Mattawoman Creek remains one of the most productive fish nurseries on the Chesapeake, and the recurring fights over development in its watershed are the latest argument over Mattawoman land.