18th Century

Between 1705 and the Civil War, the Virginia Algonquians almost disappeared from the historical record. Indian tribes appear in colonial-level records only if they retained reservations and therefore treaty rights, and then only if they had some sort of difficulty. In 1705, only five Powhatan-descended communities remained under treaty status, the Pamunkeys, the Mattaponi/ Chickahominies, the Wiccocomicos, the traditional Nansemonds, and the Gingaskins. In 1748 white trustees were appointed to oversee Pamunkey land matters, which in those days also administratively included those of the Mattaponi and Chickahominies. By the end of the century the trustees had also been given power to assist with making bylaws for the Indians.^{1Much of the summary on this page was taken from Helen Rountree and E. Randolph Turner III, Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their Predecessors (University Press of Florida, 2002), 177-182.}

The Wiccocomicos last leader, William Taptico, gave up all claim to their land in 1718. With their connection to the land broken, they ceased to exist as a tribe in the eyes of Virginia’s colonial government; they were not regarded as Indian anymore. Their fate is very difficult to trace, in the absence of any tribal roll telling us their personal names.

The traditional Nansemonds owned one reservation but after 1744 preferred to live among the Nottoways. By the 1780s there were only a handful of Nansemonds left, and these asked the colonial government to allow them to sell the reservation that was still officially theirs; the sale went through in 1792. The Gingaskins clung to their land while their population shrank to the point that they had to begin marrying out. They married both whites and free negroes. “The free negro connection exposed the Gingaskins to all of the prejudice that local whites felt toward a nonwhite population that was free and therefore incompletely controlled, a prejudice which by the early 1800s had reached paranoiac proportions in Northampton County.”

The federal Indian Non-Intercourse Act of 1790 gave the U.S. government rather than state governments the power to negotiate in land matters…in “Indian country,” which was assumed by everyone at the time to apply only to Indian groups that had not yet made treaties…with the United States. Indian peoples like the Powhatans, who had no occasion to make new treaties with anyone, remained officially outside “Indian country” as far as the federal government was concerned. Thus the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, when it finally came into existence, had no charge to oversee or protect the few surviving Powhatan reservations, much less the groups that had lost their land. The interpretation of what constituted “Indian country” would change in the late twentieth century to include “state” reservations (under treaties with colonies and later states after 1790), and the Pamunkeys would benefit from that change. But before that, no Powhatans had anything resembling “federal recognition” as Indians. And unless they had white trustees and direct access to the state governor (for those on the reservations), or firm friends in the local white community (in the case of nonreservation Powhatan descendants), they were at the mercy of whatever fears and prejudices moved their neighbors.^{2See note below.}

The greatly reduced population of the Virginia Indians prevented any more grand uprisings. Their land base was continually being reduced by white settlers through “treaties” and by sheer force. Generally treated with disdain by the British population some of the Indians tried to assimilate into a racist white society, while others tried to cling to their rapidly fading traditional life. The men still hunted (especially for deerskin to trade) and fished, and the women made items such as pottery and baskets to trade or sell to the whites.

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Last updated 05/08/2008