The Monacan Indian Nation is one of eleven Native American tribes recognized since the late 20th century by the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia. In January 2018, the United States Congress passed an act to provide federal recognition as tribes to the Monacan and five other tribes in Virginia. They had earlier been so disrupted by land loss, warfare, intermarriage, and discrimination that the main society believed they no longer were "Indians". However, the Monacans reorganized and asserted their culture.[1]
In the 21st century, the Monacan nation is located primarily in their traditional territory of Virginia's Piedmont region, particularly in Amherst County near Lynchburg. As of 2018 the Monacan Indian Nation has approximately 2,000 members.[2] There are satellite groups in West Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, and Ohio.
The Monacan nation was first recorded by Jamestown settlers in colonial Virginia. Their native language is a Siouan language which is extinct.[3] The people are related to other Siouan-speaking tribes of the inland in this region, such as the Tutelo, Saponi and Occaneechi.
Historical marker near the site of the Monacan village of Monasukapanough in northern Albemarle County, Virginia.
When Jamestown settlers first explored the James River in May 1607, they learned that the James River Monacan (along with their northern Mannahoac allies on the Rappahannock River) controlled the area of the Piedmont between the Fall Line (where present-day Richmond developed) and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Monacan were hostile competitors with the Powhatan confederacy, a group of thirty Algonquian-speaking tribes who controlled much of the Tidewater and coastal plain. The weroance Parahunt, son of paramount chief Powhatan of the Powhatan confederacy, persuaded Captain Christopher Newport not to venture beyond the James River falls into Monacan country.
However, the determined Newport made an expedition into Monacan country the following year in November 1608. On a 40-mile (64km) march, the settlers found two Monacan towns, whose names they recorded as Massinacak and Mowhemenchough. Unlike the Powhatan, who had given the settlers lavish welcomes, the Monacan largely ignored them and went about their business. The settlers captured their chief and forced him to guide them around his territory. On November 26, 1608, Peter Wynne, a member of Newport's party to the Monacan villages, wrote a letter to John Egerton informing him that some members of the party believed the pronunciation of the Monacans' language resembled "Welch" (Welsh), which Wynne spoke. Newport had asked Wynne to act as interpreter,[4] but the language was not Welsh and he could not understand it.
Mowhemencho, the Monacan nation's easternmost outpost, was between Bernard's Creek and Jones Creek in the eastern tip of present-day Powhatan County. Massinacak (Mahock) was at the mouth of Mohawk Creek, a mile south of present-day Goochland. The Monacan capital was Rassawek, located at the point within the two branches, Point of Fork, of the upper James and Rivanna rivers. Tributary to them were the Monahassanugh (later known as the Nahyssan, i.e. Tutelo), whose town was near what later developed as Wingina, and the Monasukapanough (later known as the Saponi), living near present-day Charlottesville.[citation needed] All these groups were closely related with the Siouan Manahoac to the north.[citation needed]
In 1656 several hundred Nahyssan, Mahock, and Rechahecrians (possibly Iroquoian-speaking Erie from present-day Pennsylvania) threatened both the Powhatan tribes and the settlers by camping near the James falls. A combined force of the Powhatan and settlers was sent to dislodge them. The Pamunkey chief Totopotomoi was slain in the resulting battle. Historically the Monacan and Erie were trade allies, especially copper.
The Monacan towns of Mowhemencho and Mahock were still occupied in 1670, when John Lederer and Major Harris recorded visiting them; they found that the men possessed muskets. Lederer recorded their tradition that they had settled in the area on account of an oracle 400 years earlier, having been driven from the northwest by an enemy nation. They told him they had found it occupied by the Doeg, whom they eventually displaced, in the meantime teaching them the art of growing corn.
He recorded another Monacan tradition as follows: "From four women, viz. Pash, Sepoy, Askarin, and Maraskarin, they derive the race of mankinde; which they therefore divide into four tribes, distinguished under those several names."
At the time of Lederer's visit, the tribe had about 30 bowmen or warriors, out of a total population of perhaps 100. Lederer also noted the towns of Sapon and Pintahae on the Staunton River. Batts and Fallam recorded the latter town as Hanahaskie in 1671. The 20th-century ethnologist Swanton considers this last to be a Nahyssan village. Around 1675 the Nahyssan settled on an island at the confluence of the Stanton and Dan rivers, upriver of the Occaneechi people.
In 1677, the Monacan chief Surenough was one of several native signatories to the Treaty of Middle Plantation following Bacon's Rebellion. Virginian settlers and the Pamunkey encountered them, and the Manahoac, on the Upper Mattaponi and North Anna rivers in 1684.
By 1699, the Monacan had abandoned their homeland, moving farther away due to European encroachment. The Virginian House of Burgesses granted much of the former site of Mowhemencho to French Huguenot refugees, who were settled on both sides of the James River in 1700 and 1701. First promised land at Jamestown, they were forced by the Virginian colonial government to settle above the falls. In Goochland County, they established the villages of Manakin and Sabot, today known as Manakin-Sabot, Virginia.
Although a few Monacan lingered in the area as late as 1702, the core remnant seems to have merged with the Nahyssan and other closely related Virginia Siouan tribes, by then known generally as Tutelo-Saponi. Under this collective name, the bulk of the tribe may be traced to North Carolina (1702), and back to Virginia (Fort Christanna, 1714). They headed north to join the Iroquois around the Great Lakes for protection, and were noted in Pennsylvania (Shamokin, by 1740); and in western New York at Coreorgonel by 1753, where they joined the Cayuga. They participated with them in the American Revolutionary War as allies of the British against the Patriots. After the war, the Monacan went with the Iroquois to Canada. They were settled at the (Six Nation Reserve of the Grand River First Nation) in present-day Ontario. Their settlement of Tutelo Heights was noted in 1779. By the early 20th century, their descendants in Ontario had been largely absorbed by the Cayuga tribe through intermarriage.
Smaller bands are believed to have split off in North Carolina, and at several locations across Virginia.
Origins and legends of modern tribe
Current headquarters of the Monacan Indian Nation in Amherst, Virginia
After Peter Wynne's expedition of 1608, the Monacan are one of the groups who have been conjectured to be "Welsh Indians"[citation needed]. Historians have found no evidence for that and treat it as myth[citation needed]. The Monacan language was part of the Siouan language family.
In 1831–1833, William Johns, an ancestor of some of today's Monacan, purchased 452 acres (1.83km2) of land on Bear Mountain for a settlement of families related to him. In 1850, the census recorded 29 families there.[5][6]
Over time, Native Americans in Virginia intermarried with Europeans and African Americans. Whites assumed that meant that they no longer identified as Indians, but were mistaken. In 1924, Virginia passed a Racial Integrity Act, which instituted a binary system of racial classification as black or white only. It also included the one-drop rule, requiring classification as black of a person with any known African ancestry. The director of the department of vital records insisted on reclassifying specific families as black, although they had long been recorded as Indian. This program ignored how people identified socially and culturally, and disrupted decades of records, causing American Indians in Virginia to lose historical continuity. But they kept their culture and community, and reorganized in the 20th century to regain recognition as Native American peoples.
In 1926 Mongrel Virginians: The WIN Tribe, a study of a mixed-race group in the Blue Ridge Mountains, was published by the Carnegie Institution. The author described the group as "degenerate". The author referred to the group as the WIN tribe, for White-Indian-Negro, because he was disguising the name of the group, the surnames of its members, the county which was studied – every fact about them. Some contemporary academic reviewers strongly criticized and ridiculed the book and its reliance on community anecdotes to make judgments about families and individuals.[7]
When ancestors of current Monacan families entered the U.S. military to serve in the world wars, they resisted accepting the classification of "colored", which the state of Virginia had tried impose on them.[6]
The Episcopal Church ran a primary school (Bear Mountain Indian Mission School) for the children of this community at Bear Mountain near Amherst, Virginia. There was no high school education available. In 1963, Amherst County proposed a $30,000 bond to build a school for the mission community. The proposal was voted down, and 23 students applied for transfer to public schools. The state approved their applications and the mission school closed.
Claims and recognition as Native American
In the early 1980s, Peter Houck, a local physician, published Indian Island in Amherst County, in which he speculated that the free people of color in the region during the antebellum era were in part descendants of the Monacan tribe.[8] While this population had claimed an Indian cultural identity since the turn of the 20th century, Houck was the first to link some of them to the Monacan tribal identity. Prior to Houck's book, most people claiming Native American ancestry in that vicinity had identified as Cherokee, which were well-known in the Southeast. Many of the local families continue to claim Cherokee instead of Monacan ancestry.[9]
On January 30, 2018, federal recognition status was granted to the Monacan Nation and five other tribes in Virginia through passage by Congress of the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2017. President Trump signed the bill approved by both houses of Congress.[10]
Celebration
Today the Monacan Indian Nation operates a yearly powwow in May, and a homecoming celebration in October. A model of an ancient Monacan village has been constructed as part of Natural Bridge (Virginia) State Park, in nearby Rockbridge County.
Related Research Articles
The Powhatan people may refer to any of the Indigenous Algonquian people that are traditionally from eastern Virginia. All of the Powhatan groups descend from the Powhatan Confederacy. In some instances, The Powhatan may refer to one of the leaders of the people. This is most commonly the case in historical records from English colonial accounts. The Powhatans have also been known as Virginia Algonquians, as the Powhatan language is an eastern-Algonquian language, also known as Virginia Algonquian. It is estimated that there were about 14,000–21,000 Powhatan people in eastern Virginia when English colonists established Jamestown in 1607.
The Saponi are a Native American tribe historically based in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia. They spoke a Siouan language, related to the languages of the Tutelo, Biloxi, and Ofo.
The Pamunkey Indian Tribe is one of 11 Virginia Indian tribal governments recognized by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the state's first federally recognized tribe, receiving its status in January 2016. Six other Virginia tribal governments, the Chickahominy, the Eastern Chickahominy, the Upper Mattaponi, the Rappahannock, the Monacan, and the Nansemond, were similarly recognized through the passage of the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2017 on January 12, 2018. The historical people were part of the Powhatan paramountcy, made up of Algonquian-speaking nations. The Powhatan paramount chiefdom was made up of over 30 nations, estimated to total about 10,000–15,000 people at the time the English arrived in 1607. The Pamunkey nation made up about one-tenth to one-fifteenth of the total, as they numbered about 1,000 persons in 1607.
The Chickahominy are a federally recognized tribe of Virginian Native Americans who primarily live in Charles City County, located along the James River midway between Richmond and Williamsburg in the Commonwealth of Virginia. This area of the Tidewater is not far from where they were living in 1600, before the arrival of colonists from England. They were officially recognized by the state in 1983 and by the federal government in January 2018.
The Manahoac, also recorded as Mahock, were a small group of Siouan-language Native Americans in northern Virginia at the time of European contact. They numbered approximately 1,000 and lived primarily along the Rappahannock River west of modern Fredericksburg and the Fall Line, and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They united with the Monacan, the Occaneechi, the Saponi and the Tutelo. They disappeared from the historical record after 1728.
The Native American tribes in Virginia are the indigenous tribes who currently live or have historically lived in what is now the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States of America.
The Rappahannock are a federally recognized tribe in Virginia and one of the eleven state-recognized tribes. They are made up of descendants of several small Algonquian-speaking tribes who merged in the late 17th century. In January 2018, they were one of six Virginia tribes to gain federal recognition by passage of the Thomasina E. Jordan Indian Tribes of Virginia Federal Recognition Act of 2017.
The Tutelo were Native American people living above the Fall Line in present-day Virginia and West Virginia. They spoke a Siouan dialect of the Tutelo language thought to be similar to that of their neighbors, the Monacan and Manahoac nations.
The Mattaponi tribe is one of only two Virginia Indian tribes in the Commonwealth of Virginia that owns reservation land, which it has held since the colonial era. The larger Mattaponi Indian Tribe lives in King William County on the reservation, which stretches along the borders of the Mattaponi River, near West Point, Virginia.
Tsenacommacah is the name given by the Powhatan people to their native homeland, the area encompassing all of Tidewater Virginia and parts of the Eastern Shore. More precisely, its boundaries spanned 100 miles (160 km) by 100 miles (160 km) from near the south side of the mouth of the James River all the way north to the south end of the Potomac River and from the Eastern Shore west to about the Fall Line of the rivers.
The Occaneechi are Native Americans who lived in the 17th century primarily on the large, 4-mile (6.4 km) long Occoneechee Island and east of the confluence of the Dan and Roanoke rivers, near current-day Clarksville, Virginia. They spoke one of the Siouan languages, and thus related to the Saponi, Tutelo, Eno and other Southeastern Siouan-language peoples living in the Piedmont region of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.
Cockacoeske was a 17th-century leader of the Pamunkey tribe in what is now the U.S. state of Virginia. During her thirty-year reign, she worked with the English colony of Virginia, trying to recapture the former power of past paramount chiefs and maintain peaceful unity among the several tribes under her leadership. She was the first of the tribal leaders to sign the Virginia-Indian Treaty of Middle Plantation. In 2004 Cockacoeske was honored as one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History".
The Eno or Enoke, also called Stuckenock, was an American Indian tribe located in North Carolina during the 17th and 18th centuries that was later absorbed into the Catawba tribe in South Carolina along with various other smaller tribal bands.
The Doeg were a Native American people who lived in Virginia. They spoke an Algonquian language and may have been a branch of the Nanticoke tribe, historically based on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The Nanticoke considered the Algonquian Lenape as "grandfathers". The Doeg are known for a raid in July 1675 that contributed to colonists' uprising in Bacon's Rebellion.
Wingina is an unincorporated community in Nelson County, Virginia, United States.
Fort Christanna was one of the projects of Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood, who was governor of the Virginia Colony 1710–1722. When Fort Christanna opened in 1714, Capt. Robert Hicks was named captain of the fort and he relocated his family to the area. His homestead Hicks' Ford is located near the municipality of Emporia in Greensville County, VA. The fort was designed to offer protection and schooling to the tributary Siouan and Iroquoian tribes living to the southwest of the colonized area of Virginia. Located in what became Brunswick County, Virginia, near Gholsonville, the fort was completed in 1714 and enjoyed three successful years of operation as the westernmost outpost of the British Empire at the time, before being finally closed by the House of Burgesses in 1718. However, the Saponi and Tutelo continued to live on the allotted land, 6 miles square, into the 1730s and 1740s.
Tutelo, also known as Tutelo–Saponi, is a member of the Virginian branch of Siouan languages that were originally spoken in what is now Virginia and West Virginia in the United States.
The protohistoric period of the state of West Virginia in the United States began in the mid-sixteenth century with the arrival of European trade goods. Explorers and colonists brought these goods to the eastern and southern coasts of North America and were brought inland by native trade routes. This was a period characterized by increased intertribal strife, rapid population decline, the abandonment of traditional life styles, and the extinction and migrations of many Native American groups.
As is the case with most native populations that did not use systems of writing for most or all of their history, much of what is known about Native Americans comes from the records of the Europeans who first encountered them in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Some of these accounts are accurate, while some include parts that are accurate and other parts that reflect their biases towards native peoples. One aspect of native life which the European colonists often remarked upon, when they left written records, was their system of agriculture.
The Indigenous peoples of Maryland are the tribes who historically and currently lived in the land that is now the State of Maryland in the United States of America. These tribes belong to the Northeastern Woodlands, a cultural region.
↑ "Review": A.H. Estabrook and Ivan E. McDougle, Mongrel Virginia: The WIN Tribe, in The ANNALS, American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 126, No. 1, 165–166 (1926), accessed April 8, 2010 The reviewer noted the lack of scientific data. He describes the book as "Absolutely unscientific in method; an exposé of small community moral depravity recorded from the lips of neighbors." The reviewer further criticizes the efforts at concealing the identity of the place and people, as nothing can be verified or checked, especially since some accounts are about people who have died. The reviewer noted that from his experience, there was little to differentiate this group culturally from others in the mountains of the region, and he attributed their characteristics more to the culture than to race.
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