Native Stewardship / The Monacan Peoples

For thousands of years, Indigenous people lived in and migrated throughout what is now Appalachian Virginia, where long-distance trade routes and shifting alliances linked Native peoples of different languages and nations. The New River Valley was long stewarded by Eastern Siouan people who, before colonization, called themselves Yesa, or The People, and identified with the Monacan Alliance. They hunted, fished, and cultivated wild edibles as well as corn, beans, and squash, and they maintained settlements in areas now known as Ellett Valley, Bissett Park in Radford, and Kentland Farm on the New River. Archaeology has revealed aspects of Yesa culture including ceramic technology and settlement patterns. Beginning around 1750, German, English, and Scots-Irish colonists moved into the area, severely disrupting Indigenous societies and their trading, hunting, and settlement patterns, while Virginia's colonial government barred Native people from voting, marrying white people, or testifying in court against white people. During the French and Indian War, which lasted from 1754 to 1763, colonial expansion into the Ohio River Valley intensified conflict, and between 1755 and 1758 Shawnee warriors raided western Virginia, including Draper's Meadows, in resistance to incursions into their territory. Although Native resistance temporarily drove surviving settlers east, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 pushed the boundary farther west, and settlers established plantations and farms on lands once under Monacan stewardship. Many of these properties, including Smithfield plantation founded in 1774, were worked by enslaved Black people, and slavery expanded sharply in Montgomery County. The New River Valley also became a major route in the domestic slave trade along paths that had once been Indigenous routes. Despite centuries of racism and suppression, Eastern Siouan peoples persevered: the Monacan Indian Nation gained state recognition in 1989 and federal recognition in 2018, and in 2022 Indigenous peoples were fighting to protect the land from fracked gas pipelines and development threatening the ancient Monacan of Rassawek at the confluence of the Rivanna and James rivers.

Blacksburg, Virginia · United States