Powhatan Erotic

The Powhatan were the Algonquian people of Tidewater Virginia who met the English at Jamestown in 1607 and were broken as an independent power by 1646. Their descendants live on as the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock and Nansemond tribes. The name did double duty. Powhatan was one small tribe at the falls of the James River, where Richmond now stands, and it was also the English name for Wahunsenacawh, the man born there who forged some thirty tribes into a single tributary domain, Tsenacommacah, running from the fall line to Chesapeake Bay. His title was mamanatowick, and each member tribe kept its own weroance, who owed him corn, deerskins and warriors. The land they held was a coastal plain of riverside towns, houses of bent saplings under bark and reed mats, cornfields worked by women, and fish weirs strung across tidal creeks.

Their language, Virginia Algonquian, sat in the Eastern Algonquian branch alongside Nanticoke to the north and the Carolina dialects to the south, and it was gone by the late 1700s. It left more in English than most people realize: raccoon, opossum, hominy, persimmon, hickory and tomahawk all came through word lists taken down by John Smith and William Strachey. Religion turned on two powers, a remote creator called Ahone and a nearer, demanding spirit called Okeus, served by priests who kept temples where the dried bodies of dead chiefs lay. Boys became men through the huskanaw, months of isolation and drugged trance from which they returned as if newly born. The paramount chieftaincy passed through brothers and then sisters' sons, so Wahunsenacawh was followed by his brothers Opitchapam and Opechancanough, never by his own children, Pocahontas included.

Trade turned to war fast. The first Anglo-Powhatan war closed with the marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe in 1614. Opechancanough's attack of 1622 killed about a quarter of the colony, and his rising of 1644 was his last. Captured and shot in 1646, he left the tribes as tributaries on small reserved tracts, a status fixed by the 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation. The Pamunkey and Mattaponi reservations are among the oldest in the United States and still bring the governor of Virginia their treaty tribute of game every November. Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act tried to erase them on paper, reclassifying Indians as colored on birth and marriage records for two generations. The tribes outlasted it, winning federal recognition only in 2015 and 2018. Werowocomoco, Wahunsenacawh's capital on the York River, was rediscovered in 2003 and is now a National Park Service site.