Nottoway Erotic

The Nottoway were an Iroquoian people living in the middle of Algonquian country, and that anomaly is the first thing worth understanding about them. Their towns sat along the river that now carries their name, in the flat pine and swamp country of southeastern Virginia's coastal plain, south of the James. Their neighbors to the north and east belonged to the Powhatan world; to the west were Siouan speakers. The Nottoway, along with the closely related Meherrin and the Tuscarora further south in North Carolina, spoke a language from the same family as Mohawk and Seneca, several hundred miles up the map. Nottoway is not their word for themselves. It comes from an Algonquian term applied to Iroquoian speakers generally, usually glossed as adder or rattlesnake. Their own name was Cheroenhaka, which the modern tribe has taken back.

Colonial Virginia dealt with them as a distinct polity. Edward Bland's 1650 expedition passed through their palisaded towns, and after Bacon's Rebellion the 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation made them tributaries of the colony, a status that bought some protection and cost them autonomy. Two reservation tracts in Southampton County, known locally as the Circle and the Square, were set aside in the early 1700s; over the next century and a half, state-appointed trustees sold the land off in pieces until almost nothing remained. The language went with it. In 1820 Thomas Jefferson, still chasing his theory of Indian origins, arranged for a vocabulary to be taken down from Edith Turner, an elderly Nottoway woman. That word list is most of what linguists have, and it settled the Iroquoian question. What came after was less a disappearance than a paperwork erasure: under the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and the long tenure of registrar Walter Plecker, Indian families across Virginia were reclassified as colored on birth and marriage records, which made the community legally invisible for generations while its members went on farming the same counties and keeping track of one another. Two organizations won recognition from the Virginia General Assembly in 2010, the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia and the Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe, the second of which has bought land near Courtland for a heritage site. Neither is federally recognized. Both are rebuilding from archives, family memory, and a two hundred year old list of words.