Monacan Erotic

The Monacan are the Native people of Virginia's Piedmont, the rolling country west of the fall line where the James River stops being navigable. To the English at Jamestown, that line marked the edge of the Powhatan world. Beyond it lived a different nation with a different language and a long record of conflict with the Powhatan chiefdoms downriver. Today the Monacan Indian Nation is centered at Bear Mountain in Amherst County, a hilly stretch of the upper James. The community held together there after nearly everything else had been taken.

Before contact, Monacan towns lined the James and the rivers that feed it. The chief town, Rassawek, stood where the Rivanna joins the James. The Monacan and their Mannahoac allies spoke languages usually classed as Siouan. That set them apart from the Algonquian speakers of the coastal plain and tied them to the Tutelo, Saponi and other peoples of the southern Piedmont. Very little of the Monacan language was ever written down, and it is no longer spoken. Their ancestors built burial mounds in layers, adding to them over generations. Thomas Jefferson dug into one near the Rivanna, and that dig is often called the start of systematic archaeology in America.

Colonial expansion, epidemics and war broke up the Piedmont towns in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Some Monacans merged with the Tutelo and Saponi, who later moved north. In 1700, French Huguenot refugees settled on an abandoned Monacan town site, which is where the Virginia place name Manakin comes from. Others pulled back into the Amherst County hills. In the early twentieth century the Episcopal Church opened a mission at Bear Mountain. Under segregation, its school was for decades the main schooling open to Monacan children. That is why Episcopal ties still run deep in the community, and the mission land has since gone back to the tribe.

The harshest chapter was fought on paper. Under Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, state registrar Walter Plecker changed Native Virginians to "colored" in birth and marriage records, and he went after the Amherst County families with particular hostility. A 1926 eugenics study, Mongrel Virginians, targeted the same community. Many families left Virginia rather than live under those labels. The altered records made recognition a fight that lasted decades: Virginia recognized the tribe in 1989, and federal recognition came in 2018. Since then the nation has pushed a regional water authority to move a planned pumping station off the Rassawek site. Its yearly powwow keeps alive a people that officials once tried to erase from the records.