My mother's ancestors first came to this country in the early days of the 16th century, settling in what would later become Williamsburg, Virginia. I recently found out that the earliest of those ancestors is buried under the floor of a church in Williamsburg. He had served as vestry at that very same church.
In the early history of America, we learn about such places, as well as Plymouth, Massachusetts; Roanoke, North Carolina; and Jamestown, Virginia. We are often taught that pilgrims landed in Jamestown and made nice with the natives, eventually leading to a feast that we now commemorate as Thanksgiving. There is much in that legend that is historically inaccurate, as is the case with much of what we learn in school, as historical facts blend with oral traditions, myths and legends.
The powerful Native American chief, known as Powhatan, had refused the English settlers’ demands to return stolen guns and swords at Jamestown, so the English retaliated. They killed 15 of the native men, burned their houses and stole their corn. Then they kidnapped the wife of a native leader and her children and marched them to the English boats.
They put the children to death by throwing them overboard and “shooting out their brains in the water,” wrote George Percy, a prominent English settler in Jamestown.
And their orders for the leader’s wife: Burn her.
Percy wrote, “Having seen so much bloodshed that day now in my cold blood I desired to see no more and for to burn her I did not hold it fitting but either by shot or sword to give her a quicker dispatch.”
She was spared, but only briefly. Two Englishmen took her to the woods and put her to the sword.
The woman was one of 15,000 American natives living in the Tidewater area along the shores of the York and James rivers in 1607 when the first English settlers arrived in Virginia. Her violent death is symbolic of the underlying tensions that lasted for centuries between the whites and the native tribes.
That being said, there had been much fanfare involving the 400th anniversary of the settlement at Jamestown, the establishment of the first representative government in Virginia and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the shores of North America. Those settlers have been idolized as people who endured by the sweat of their labor, the aid of native Powhatans and the leadership of Captain John Smith, whose story is immortalized in movies such as "Pocahontas".
But there is much falsehood in that story and the descendants of those original Powhatans worry that their place in history is often overlooked in historical texts.
Jamestown has been the story of the birthplace of America, according to anthropologist Ashley Atkins Spivey, a member of the Pamunkey tribe, which was among the first tribes the settlers encountered and which now has roughly 400 members.
She said you cannot talk about the first government without talking about the American native people and a government that were already there, she said.
“We are the first Americans,” she said. “We were here, and we still exist in Virginia today.”
The Pamunkey tribe’s reservation lies an hour from Jamestown, past fields of corn and soybeans in mostly wooded wetlands that twist along the river. Sixty enrolled tribal members live on the 1,200 acres of the reservation.
The tribe traces its roots back 10,000 years to the Tidewater area, and its reservation is said to be one of the oldest in the country. For 35 years, Pamunkey tribal leaders sought federal recognition. In 2015, they became the first tribe in the state to get it. They were followed by six others in Virginia. Now, the Pamunkey are seeking approval to open Virginia’s first casino, in the Norfolk area.
But 400 years ago, the natives ruled the Tidewater.
When the settlers arrived in Virginia in 1607, the Pamunkeys were part of an empire of 30 tribes overseen by Powhatan, who was known as the “chief of chiefs.”
Through inheritance, war and marriage, Powhatan had built a realm that stretched about 6,000 square miles from modern-day Alexandria to the North Carolina border. The Algonquian-speaking Indians called their land “Tsenacomoco,” meaning “densely inhabited land.”
Powhatan, whose formal name was Wahunsonacock, gave the tribes autonomy under regional chiefs, and they paid him a tribute of animal hides, beads, shells and food, which he stored in warehouses. With his brother Opechancanough as his “war chief,” he could command nearly 1,500 warriors in times of battle.
Tribes lived in villages of up to 100 longhouses along rivers and tributaries, where they hunted, fished, grew crops and collected fruits and nuts as food and medicine.
They traveled for trade along the waterways in canoes dug out from massive tree trunks. Canoes were considered more valuable to a native than a house, historians said.
When the English arrived, Powhatan wanted to trade with them - food in exchange for weapons and more-sophisticated tools to butcher deer and to cut hides. The English also had copper, which was so valuable that Powhatan used it to pay warriors. Copper also held special religious significance; its reflective qualities allowed natives to be in touch with the spirits of those who had died, according to some historians and Pamunkeys.
According to archaeologists, Powhatan “realized the English could be a lifeline to trade if they got copper and weapons to go after their enemies.”
Powhatan gradually realized that containing the settlers would not be possible.
Telling the Native American story can be challenging, experts said, given that tribes in the 1600s did not have a written language and much of the history relies on the oral tradition passed down from generation to generation.
Today's Pamunkeys have complicated feelings about Jamestown.
Four hundred years ago, Powhatan tried to understand what the English were doing as they built a fort at Jamestown and constructed houses.
In 1607, Powhatan ordered the capture of John Smith so he could learn more about their intentions and perhaps turn Smith into an ally. During his captivity, the natives tried to “adopt” Smith in an elaborate three-day ceremony.
Smith had quite a different interpretation. At one point, when the natives laid his head on two rocks, Smith thought they were going to kill him. Then, Pocahontas - Powhatan’s daughter - came to his rescue.
His life was spared, but not for the reasons he thought. It was all a “scripted, symbolic adoption ceremony," according to historians.
In A Land as God Made It, James Horn wrote that Powhatan was guaranteeing Smith and the settlers food and safety “if they acknowledged the great chief as their lord and became a subordinate people within his chiefdom.”
Smith did not take his offer, and over the next few years, he eroded Powhatan’s power by trading food for weapons with other tribes - including some of Powhatan’s enemies - and the great chief grew more suspicious.
When the English torched some sacred native sites and then came looking for food, some of the settlers disappeared. Another group went looking for them and found one of the lieutenants, dead, stripped of values and with their mouths stuffed with bread, an unmistakable message to the English, according to one historian.
By 1613, both sides had faced enormous setbacks. The English and Indians had struggled through five years of battles and ambushes, starvation and disease that left hundreds dead on both sides.
The English captured Powhatan’s most beloved daughter - Pocahontas - and held her captive for a year.
Pocahontas learned English, converted to Christianity and changed her name to Rebecca, “mother of two peoples.” She married John Rolfe, an English settler, on April 5, 1614.
Powhatan had built his empire in part through marriage alliances, so he probably saw this marriage as an agreement. The English would not expand their settlements further, and the two sides would coexist on equal terms, according to Horn. Rolfe and Pocahontas had a son, Thomas. She went to England and was set to return to Virginia but died in her early 20s in 1617, probably of tuberculosis or pneumonia.
A year later, her father died.
Powhatan’s warrior brother Opechancanough took over. He feigned interest in converting to Christianity but began plotting against the English.
He had gotten tribes on both sides of the river to form alliances, “united by their hatred of English settlers and their determination to be rid of them,” Horn wrote.
On March 22, 1622, the tribe attacked in what some historians call “the Great Uprising,” using the settlers’ own tools against them.
The attack was so unexpected that in one day, they had killed at least 320, roughly a quarter of the 1,200 who were there.
The English sought revenge, sailing up and down the rivers destroying Indian villages and seizing corn.
The Pamunkeys launched another attack a few years later but were beaten back by English soldiers.
In the Treaty of 1646, the English made the Pamunkeys agree to recognize the English empire. Even today, as part of that treaty, the natives pay tribute to the governor by bringing a deer on the day before Thanksgiving. That same treaty also established what is now the reservation.
Debra Martin, who serves on the tribal council, laments that much of the tribe’s history has been lost. Still, she said, living on Pamunkey land is special for her.
“The spirit of my ancestors is here,” she said, standing near a hillside that holds the remains of Powhatan. “Knowing this is where they walked thousands of years ago, before it was a reservation, I can sense their presence here. It just speaks to my heart.”
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