Persistence

The Powhatan world changed dramatically after European colonization, but Virginia’s Native peoples responded with innovation and endurance while maintaining memories of traditional customs and ties to ancestral places. Jamestown, the first successful English colony in North America, was located 14 miles west of here, and English settlement eventually spread across all of Tsenacomacoh. Powhatan resistance to this gradual invasion, including coordinated revolts in 1622 and 1644, ultimately failed. In 1677, representatives of Powhatan and Iroquoian tribes signed the Articles of Peace, or Treaty of Middle Plantation, which guaranteed homelands and hunting and fishing rights while requiring an annual tribute to Virginia’s governor. The Pamunkey and Mattaponi have continued that tradition into the modern era by giving the governor a deer each year, asserting their continued existence as autonomous Native communities with their own leadership independent of the surrounding nation. During the early twentieth century, other Virginia tribes formally organized governments and built schools and churches, pushing back against official policies that denied the existence of Native people in Virginia. After a long period of marginalization, both state and federal governments have begun to recognize Virginia’s tribes and tribal sovereignty, affirming their ability to govern themselves and strengthening their commitment to autonomy today and in the future. Throughout this history of displacement, Virginia Native peoples have consistently returned to ancestral lands to remember the deep past, and evidence from the 1700s records that they marked these returns by creating stone mounds.

Virginia · United States