 Nottoway River in historic Nottoway territory | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
|---|---|
| Virginia | |
| Languages | |
| English, Nottoway (historical) | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Nansemond, Weyanock, [1] Meherrin, Tuscarora |
The Nottoway (also Nottaway) are an Iroquoian Native American tribe in Virginia. The Nottoway spoke a Nottoway language in the Iroquoian language family.
The term Nottoway may derive from Nadawa or Nadowessioux (widely translated as "poisonous snake"), an Algonquian-language term.
Frank Siebert suggested that the term natowewa stems from Proto-Algonquian *na:tawe:wa and refers to the Massasauga, a pit viper of the Great Lakes region. The extension of the meaning as "Iroquoian speakers" is secondary.[ citation needed ] In Algonquian languages beyond the geographical range of the viper (i.e. Cree–Innu–Naskapi and Eastern Algonquian), the term's primary reference continues to focus on *na:t- 'close upon, mover towards, go after, seek out, fetch' and *-awe: 'condition of heat, state of warmth,' but no longer refers to the viper.[ citation needed ]
A potential etymology in Virginia of *na:tawe:wa (Nottoway) refers to *na:t- 'seeker' + -awe: 'fur,' [2] or literally 'traders' [3] The earliest colonial Virginia reference to "Nottoway" also frames Algonquian/Iroquoian exchanges in terms of trade: roanoke (shell beads) for skins (deer and otter). [4]
The Algonquian speakers also referred to the Nottoway, Meherrin and Tuscarora people (also of the Iroquoian-language family) as Mangoak or Mangoags, a term which English colonists used in their records from 1584 to 1650. This term, Mengwe or Mingwe, was used by the Dutch and applied to the Iroquoian Susquehannock ("White Minquas") and Erie people ("Black Minquas").[ citation needed ]
The name Cheroenhaka is an autonym for Nottoway people. [5] The meaning of the name Cheroenhaka (in Tuscarora: Čiruʼęhá·ka·ʼ [6] ) is uncertain. (It has been spelled in various ways: Cherohakah, Cheroohoka or Tcherohaka.) The linguist Blair A. Rudes analyzed the second element as -hakaʼ meaning "one or people who is/are characterized in a certain way." He conjectured that the first element of the name was related to the Tuscarora term čárhuʼ (meaning "tobacco", as both tribes used this product in ceremonies). [7] The term has also been interpreted as "People at the Fork of the Stream". [8]
The Nottoway language is an Iroquoian language. It became extinct well before 1900. [7] At the time of European contact in 1650, speakers numbered only in the hundreds. From then until 1735, a number of colonists learned the language and acted as official interpreters for the Colony of Virginia, including Thomas Blunt, Henry Briggs, and Thomas Wynn. These interpreters also served the adjacent Meherrin, as well as the Nansemond, who spoke Nottoway in addition to their own Algonquian dialect of Powhatan. [9] The last two interpreters were dismissed in 1735 since the Nottoway by then were using English.
By 1820, three elderly people still spoke Nottoway. [7] In that year John Wood collected over 250-word samples from one of these, Chief Edith Turner (Nottoway, ca. 1754–1838). He sent them to Thomas Jefferson, who shared them with Peter Stephen Du Ponceau. In their correspondence, these two men quickly confirmed that the Nottoway language was of the Iroquoian family. Several additional words, for a total of about 275, were collected by James Trezvant after 1831 and published by Albert Gallatin in 1836.[ citation needed ]
In the early 20th century, John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt (1910) and Hoffman (1959) analyzed the Nottoway vocabulary in comparison with Tuscarora, also Iroquoian, and found them closely related.[ citation needed ]
The Nottoway, like their close, fellow Iroquoian neighbors, the Meherrin and Tuscarora, lived just west of the Fall Line in the Piedmont region. English explorer Edward Bland is believed to have been the first European to encounter them when he made an expedition from Fort Henry. He noted meeting them in his journal on August 27, 1650. At the time, the Nottoway numbered no more than 400 to 500. Bland visited two of their three towns, on Stony Creek and the Rowantee Branch of the Nottoway River, in what is now Sussex County. These towns were led by the brothers Oyeocker and Chounerounte.[ citation needed ]
A Nottoway representative signed the Treaty of Middle Plantation of 1677 in 1680, establishing the tribe as a tributary to the Virginia colony. [1] English squatters encroached on their lands. [1]
By 1681, hostile tribes caused the Nottoway to relocate southward to Assamoosick Swamp in modern Surry County. In 1694 they moved again, to the mouth of a swamp in what is now Southampton County. Around this time, they absorbed the remnants of the Weyanoke, an Algonquian-speaking tribe that had formerly been part of the Powhatan confederacy. [10]
The Nottoway suffered high fatalities from epidemics of new Eurasian diseases, such as measles and smallpox, to which they had no natural immunity. They contracted the diseases from European contact, as these diseases were by then endemic among Europeans. Tribal warfare and encroaching colonists also reduced the population.
Remnants of the Nansemond and Weyanock joined the Nottoway in the early 18th century. [1] In 1705, the Nottoway may have numbered 400, based on colonial historian Robert Beverley Jr.'s observations. [11]
In 1711, two young Nottoway men attended the College of William and Mary. [12] After the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), Tuscarora people migrated north, where they became the sixth nation in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and some Nottoway left with them. [11]
The Nottoway who remained in Virginia signed a treaty with the British in 1713, that secured two small tracts of land within their historical territory. [11] They sold the smaller of the two tracts in 1734. In 1744, they sold 5,000 acres of their remaining land, [11] followed by sales in 1748 and 1756. [13]
By 1772, only 35 Nottoway lived on their land, of which they leased half. [14] At the end of the 19th century, the Weyanock merged completely into the Nottoway, with the surnames Wynoake and Wineoak appearing on public documents. [15] When the tribe sold more land in 1794, the Nottoway consisted of 7 men and 10 women and children. [16]
From 1803 to 1809, Southampton County courts heard a protracted land dispute. [16] At the time, as historian Helen C. Rountree wrote, "The Nottoway had no formally organized government. European-American trustees tasked with overseeing tribal issues were charged with drafting bylaws for the tribe. [16] Tribal members married European-American and African-American spouses. [13]
In 1808, only 17 Nottoway survived, including Billy Woodson and Edith Turner, who became a chief. They owned 3,900 acres and cultivated 144 acres of corn. [17] Turner, who ran a successful farm on the reservation, successfully advocated for four Nottoway orphans to return to the tribe. [18]
In 1818, tribal members petitioned the Virginia General Assembly to be allowed to sell almost half of the remaining 3,912 acres of reservation land. The petition stated that there were only 26 Nottoways. [19] By 1821, 30 Nottoways requested termination and for their land to be allotted in fee simple title. [20] The Virginia General Assembly rejected that request and another in 1822. [21] In 1823, Billy Woodson (Nottoway), an educated son of a European-American, requested termination, and in 1824 Virginia passed a law that would gradually terminate its responsibility and allowed remaining Nottoways to request individual allotment of land. [22] Woodson (under the name Bozeman) and Turner applied for their allotment and shares of a fund in 1830. [23] When Turner died in 1838, her estate went to Edwin Turner (Nottoway), whose children owned the last of the Nottoway reservation. [24] While other tribal members received individual land allotments through the years, Turner kept his and purchased more land. [25] The last tribally held land was allotted in 1878. [26]
Despite an 1833 Virginia law that stated descendants of English and American Indian people were "persons of mixed blood, not being negroes of mulattos"; however, with the end of the reservation, white Virginians considered them to be "free Negroes because of their African ancestry," as Rountree wrote. [27]
The tribe depended on the cultivation of staples, such as the three sisters, varieties of maize, squash, and beans. The cultivation and processing of crops were typically done by women, who also selected and preserved varieties of seeds to produce different types of crops. The men hunted game and fished in the rivers. They built multi-family dwellings known as longhouses in communities which they protected by stockade fences known as palisades.[ citation needed ]
The tribe likely had clans, but ethnographer John R. Swanton wrote, "the fact cannot be established." [28]
In the early 18th century, Nottoway girls wore wampum necklaces. [29]
The state of Virginia recognized two state-recognized tribes, the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia and the Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe, [30] in February 2010. [31] [32] Neither is federally recognized as a Native American tribe. [33]
The Tuscarora are an Indigenous Peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands in Canada and the United States. They are an Iroquoian Native American and First Nations people. The Tuscarora Nation, a federally recognized tribe, is based in New York, and the Tuscarora First Nation is one of the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario.
The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.
The Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe, also the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, is a state-recognized tribe and nonprofit organization in North Carolina. They are not federally recognized as a Native American tribe.
The Meherrin people are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands, who spoke an Iroquian language. They lived between the Piedmont and coastal plains at the border of Virginia and North Carolina.
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 Coree were a very small Native American tribe, who once occupied a coastal area south of the Neuse River in southeastern North Carolina in the area now covered by Carteret and Craven counties. Early 20th-century scholars were unsure of what language they spoke, but the coastal areas were mostly populated by Iroquois and Algonquian peoples.
The Machapunga were a small Algonquian language–speaking Native American tribe from coastal northeastern North Carolina. They were part of the Secotan people. They were a group from the Powhatan Confederacy who migrated from present-day Virginia.
The Piscataway Indian Nation, also called Piscatawa, is a state-recognized tribe in Maryland who identify as descendants of the historic Piscataway people. At the time of European encounter, the Piscataway was one of the most populous and powerful Native polities of the Chesapeake Bay region, with a territory on the north side of the Potomac River. By the early seventeenth century, the Piscataway had come to exercise hegemony over other Algonquian-speaking Native American groups on the north bank of the river. The Piscataway nation declined dramatically before the nineteenth century, under the influence of colonization, infectious disease, and intertribal and colonial warfare.
The Native American tribes in Virginia are the Indigenous peoples whose tribal nations historically or currently are based in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States of America.
The Piscatawaypih-SKAT-ə-WAY or Piscatawapih-SKAT-ə-WAY, PIH-skə-TAH-wə, are Native Americans. They spoke Algonquian Piscataway, a dialect of Nanticoke. One of their neighboring tribes, with whom they merged after a massive decline of population following two centuries of interactions with European settlers, called them the Conoy.
The Nansemond are the Indigenous people of the Nansemond River, a 20-mile-long tributary of the James River in Virginia. Nansemond people lived in settlements on both sides of the Nansemond River where they fished, harvested oysters, hunted, and farmed in fertile soil. Today, Nansemond people belong to the federally recognized Nansemond Indian Nation.
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.
The Occaneechi are Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands whose historical territory was in the Piedmont region of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.
The Chowanoc, also Chowanoke, were an Algonquian-speaking Native American tribe who historically lived near the Chowan River in North Carolina.
The Mingo people are an Iroquoian group of Native Americans, primarily Seneca and Cayuga, who migrated west from New York to the Ohio Country in the mid-18th century, and their descendants. Some Susquehannock survivors also joined them, and assimilated. Anglo-Americans called these migrants mingos, a corruption of mingwe, an Eastern Algonquian name for Iroquoian-language groups in general. The Mingo have also been called "Ohio Iroquois" and "Ohio Seneca".
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.
Nottoway, also called Cheroenhaka, is an extinct language spoken by the Nottoway people. Nottoway is closely related to Tuscarora within the Iroquoian language family. Two tribes of Nottoway are recognized by the state of Virginia: the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia and the Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe. Other Nottoway descendants live in Wisconsin and Canada, where some of their ancestors fled in the 18th century. The last known speaker, Edith Turner, died in 1838. The Nottoway people are undertaking work for language revival.
The Neusiok were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands in present-day North Carolina. They were also known as the Neuse Indians.
The Indigenous peoples of Maryland are the tribes who historically and currently live 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.
The Weyanoke people were an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands.
| Federally recognized | |
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| State-recognized | |
| Historic | |
