History
Early History and Political Structure
Our Piscataway ancestors are presumed to have migrated into what is now called the southern Maryland tidewater region following a global warming that melted ice sheets in the Chesapeake Bay area some 15,000 years ago. The melting of the ice, which created the Chesapeake Bay, Potomac and Susquehannah Rivers, and their countless tributaries, provided a region with rich soil and ample game to support a community that subsisted on hunting, fishing, foraging, and cultivation of corn, beans, squash and many other plant species.
Piscataway creation stories tell us we have been here since the beginning of time and refer to our homeland as Yagaocanahagary (pronounced ‘YOK-oh-krah-na-ga-REE’), meaning “land between the two points.” The word is Iroquoian and is the only recorded reference to our homeland. According to oral tradition, Piscataway people lived here without a centralized form of government until roughly the latter half of the 14th century. The stratified political system – one in which a grand chief (Tayac) was responsible for various districts of people who themselves were subjects of local or regional chiefs (Werowances) – is said to have started with the coming of a man is is said to have been “Jan Jan Wisos” (very wise). His name was Uttapoingassenem (pronounced ‘oo-TAH-poing-GUS-en-em’). He arrived in Yagaocanahagary from Maryland’s Eastern Shore thirteen generations before the death of the Tayac, Kittamaqua, in 1644.
Uttapoingassenem’s ascent to the newly-formed role of Tayac is said to have been entirely peaceful. He established political order through sheer leadership and character, rather than wars and force. Succession as was matrilineal, and persisted in official form until the death of Kittamaqua. The last recorded reference to a Piscataway Tayac was noted in Pittsburgh during a peace treaty signing by the Tayac named, “Old Sack”.
Piscataway Identity
Though referred to as Piscataway today, we did not refer to ourselves as such historically. Neither oral history nor post-contact records allude to a common name for the native people of southern Maryland prior to European contact. It was usual custom for native people to refer to themselves as ‘human beings’, ‘real people’, or just ‘people’ – in which case it is likely that they called themselves Nannuock (pronounced ‘NAN-oo-WOK’), which is an eastern Algonquian word meaning “people.”
Piscataways lived in villages that bore names describing the surrounding landscape or function of the village, for example:
Unlike European villages which remained fully populated and in-place year round, Piscataway villages were occupied year round only by elderly and very young children who could not travel to winter camps. Men and women often struck out in family groups in the fall from centrally located villages to establish smaller seasonal camps to hunt, cure hides, make clothing, gather firewood, and plan for the spring move back to the waters edge. In early spring the young men and women went to the villages to make repairs to the houses and fishing weirs in preparation for the village populace returning for fishing, ground clearing, planting, foraging for early fruits, reclaiming buried stores of seeds and dried foods. Sedentary villages could were often moved due to pest infestations, flash floods, exhausted soil, or raids. With seasonal rounds, the family (clan) was a far more permanent and important fixture of life than the village. Ask a Piscataway woman where she is from, and she is more likely to respond with the name of her clan than the name of her village.
The principal village occupied by the Tayac at the time of European contact was called Moyaone. This remained the Tayac’s residence until it was twice burned by Virginia colonists. The inhabitants moved away from Moyoane’s vulnerable location at the edge of the river, to establish a more defensible site further inland at the confluence of what are today called Piscataway Creek and Tinkers Creek. We called the place Piscataway – meaning “where the waters blend” – because of the blending of brackish and fresh water where the creeks join. ‘Piscataway’ was a term commonly used by Algonquian-speaking people in the eastern woodlands to denote this specific geographic feature. As such, our being termed ‘Piscataway’ as a tribe is a coincidence stemming from contact with Europeans, which is explained later in the story.
First Contacts with Europeans
Native people in Yagaocanahagary were familiar with Europeans long before the founding of Maryland. Spanish ships sailed into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers in the 1580s and established a short-lived camp in present-day Bladensburg. Later English traders like Henry Fleet, spent years trading with the tribes along the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. He would wind up being held prisoner for years by the Nacotchtank for attempting to go past that village to trade directly with tribes further north.
English and other merchants sailed into the Potomac to engage in trade at Nacotchtank – a large village that has been described as a 17th century Atlantic City. This enormous village stretched from Blue Plains near today’s Woodrow Wilson Bridge northward over what is now Bolling Air Force Base, then east on the Anacostia River to the site of today’s PEPCO plant on Benning Road. Nacotchtank was a major center of trade for native people throughout the east. European merchants that wanted to bypass the village to eliminate it as an intermediary in trading with tribes in the north and west were aggressively discouraged from doing so.
Some years later, William Claiborne – a Virginia colonist and merchant – would see the benefit in establishing a trading post in the Chesapeake Bay. He did so on what is known today as Kent Island, to trade directly with northern tribes for their superior fur pelts. This event had enormous consequences for the Piscataway, as Nacotchtank was eventually abandoned as trade dried up and tribes from the north, armed by Swedish and Dutch merchants, continually raided the village. They sought the protection of the Piscataway, moving south to the Accokeek area. Trade with the Swedes and Dutch would also provide northern tribes (Susquehanna and Iroquois) with staggering military superiority over the southern tribes, which would allow them to conduct countless raids into the south with virtual impunity (many of these raids were conducted to obtain captives and supplies to replenish their own losses from war and disease brought to their lands by Europeans). The Nacotchtank affair was the Piscataways’ first encounter with the results, both direct and indirect, of European contact. Though contemporary historians tend to argue that the inhabitants of Nacotchtank spoke Iroquoian languages and were under the protection of the northern tribes, the early record indicates otherwise:
The company of colonists initially landed on what local Indians called Herron Island. The island is the site upon which Calvert took possession of land chartered to him by the King of England. After a brief ceremony, the island was named St. Clement. Jesuit priests in the company of the colonists conducted a mass and erected a large wooden cross (a large white cross stands on the island today, commemorating the event). Among these priests was Father Andrew White, who would receive notoriety in early colonial history for his interaction with the native people of southern Maryland. Particularly famous was his converting of the Tayac Kittamaqua to Christianity.
‘Whirlwind’ People
Calvert determined to locate his colony within a village of the Patuxent tribe and found both the people and the accommodations satisfactory. The ‘Proprietor’, as Calvert was known, would stake claim to his ‘Palatinate’ but, with good reason, would fail to inform the Tayac that he was dispossessing him of his country.
Piscataway lands were ceded in ever-increasing number to colonists through a series of treaties that exchanged these territories for military protection and guarantees of reserved lands for Indian dwelling, fishing, hunting and agriculture. It was under pressure to secure land from colonial encroachment that the Colonial Governor designated the Tayac as the single authority for dealing with the tribes in southern Maryland. The tribes would never recover from the disruption brought about by this decision. From that time the English insisted to use the term ‘Piscataway’ inclusively when referring to Indians in any southern part of the state. As more colonists entered the state, however, encroachment on reserved territory increased – particularly as colonial farmers allowed their horses, cows, and especially pigs to roam freely, trampling and eating native gardens. Indian retaliation against encroachment, usually in the form of slaughtering the offending animal or, in some cases, confronting the owners, was often used by the colonial government as an excuse to seize more Piscataway land. Faced with the impossible military superiority of the colonists in terms of numbers, resources, and technology, the native people had no choice but to retreat from the land they had occupied for centuries. The colonists further broke their treaties by failing to protect the Maryland Indians from the onslaught of northern tribes desperate for southern resources. Before long, the increasing aggression of both colonists and the northern tribes caused the Tayac to remove his people first to the Virginia side of the Potomac River, then to an island in the Potomac above the fall line (today known as Heaters Island). Many of the tribe’s members did not remove from southern Maryland, and many of those that did leave returned. The Choptico are said to have returned in full number and had among them the Tayac’s son.
The southern Maryland tribes would find themselves constantly on the move due to disease, encroachment, colonial aggression and manipulation, dishonest traders, dealers in liquor, and a lack of game animals to hunt. The constancy of movement would result in neighboring tribes naming us “Conoy”, an Iroquoian word meaning “whirlwind” or “that which moves about quickly.” While residing in Pennsylvania, tribal leaders of the Piscataway participated in and signed many treaties to which the Maryland Governor was a party. One such treaty called for the Governor of Maryland to allow tribal members remaining in Maryland to leave and join their relatives in Pennsylvania. The Governor agreed to do so, but he never issued passes that would allow our departure.
Attempts at Termination
The old historical record closes out on the “Piscataway/Conoy” with the signing of a treaty at Fort Pitt following the close of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War). The conclusion of the Seven Years War had drastic consequences for all Indians in the east, including the Piscataway. With the French and Spanish all but expelled from the continent, the English, followed by the Americans, were free to focus almost exclusively on the ‘Indian problem.’
The period prior to the war had been a struggle between European empires that the Indians buttressed against one another through trade and military alliances to ensure their survival. The period after the war presented a new model that was as simple as it was brutal: the war between empires was replaced with a race war. From this time until nearly a century after the close of the American Revolution, the historical record closes on Indians within the boundaries of the state as the government endeavored to destroy them either physically or demographically. To the casual student of history, it would seem that Indians in Maryland vanished into thin air after the Seven Years War.
Refusing to recognize any Indian leadership allowed the state to seize and dispose of land previously set aside under treaty for the use of Maryland’s Indian people. Subsequent wars and political machinations turned state attention and priorities to matters other than Indians, who were now inconsequential to its survival and did not pose a military threat. Maryland, like other colonies bent on terminating all things Indian in their states, used the opportunity following the Revolution to declare Indian people within its jurisdiction “extinct” as political entities. Many interpret that as being non existent. The rubric was to apply to a lack of political identity, but it instead became interpreted to mean they no longer existed as a race of people. State government records began referring to Indians as people of color, then as colored people, ultimately enumerating them among the African American population, in spite of protests from both sides.
Maryland Indians continued to identify themselves as such in spite of bureaucratic measures to prevent it. Authorities in schools and other government agencies refused to accept ‘Indian’ as a classification on official documents, often citing the fact that ‘Indian’ was not a legal classification on state forms. Maryland schools refused to identify children as Indian until a lawsuit filed in 1968 proved successful. To this day, the school system is reluctant to acknowledge its native students and include their history in statewide curriculum.
There are numerous works available from ethnographers, archaeologists, and historians that debate the idea of remnant groups of native people still existing within their original homelands. Throughout the east, remnant tribal groups must continue to survive attempts to eliminate them physically and demographically by state governments as well as social and religious organizations with political agendas.
Today’s Piscataway
Today there are several groups tracing their ancestry to the historic tribes of southern Maryland, but neither the state nor federal governments extends ‘official’ recognition to any of us. In 2004, Maryland’s Governor issued an Executive Order affording Maryland’s indigenous people the right to assert our Indian identity and the opportunity to receive services and participate as a minority in established programs as allowed by law, but did not extend recognition to the tribes. State law currently requires Federal or State recognition for Indian people to gain access to education, health, and economic programs for minorities under state agencies. In effect, this makes the Governor’s overture an empty gesture. The Maryland General Assembly established criteria for tribes to seek “State Recognition of Maryland Indian Status” after determining their lack of official status as Indians (and, therefore, as minorities) denied them access to programs.
Maryland’s native people continue to maintain their identity and culture without official recognition from the government, though we continue to seek the opportunities and benefits this status would bring us. Due to excessive social, political, and peer pressure on impressionable children and some adults, many of our members identify themselves as Black, White, Hispanic, or even Asian to avoid what to some is too often a burdensome and unneeded negative atmosphere fermented by the absence of “official” status as Indians.
Our Piscataway ancestors are presumed to have migrated into what is now called the southern Maryland tidewater region following a global warming that melted ice sheets in the Chesapeake Bay area some 15,000 years ago. The melting of the ice, which created the Chesapeake Bay, Potomac and Susquehannah Rivers, and their countless tributaries, provided a region with rich soil and ample game to support a community that subsisted on hunting, fishing, foraging, and cultivation of corn, beans, squash and many other plant species.
Piscataway creation stories tell us we have been here since the beginning of time and refer to our homeland as Yagaocanahagary (pronounced ‘YOK-oh-krah-na-ga-REE’), meaning “land between the two points.” The word is Iroquoian and is the only recorded reference to our homeland. According to oral tradition, Piscataway people lived here without a centralized form of government until roughly the latter half of the 14th century. The stratified political system – one in which a grand chief (Tayac) was responsible for various districts of people who themselves were subjects of local or regional chiefs (Werowances) – is said to have started with the coming of a man is is said to have been “Jan Jan Wisos” (very wise). His name was Uttapoingassenem (pronounced ‘oo-TAH-poing-GUS-en-em’). He arrived in Yagaocanahagary from Maryland’s Eastern Shore thirteen generations before the death of the Tayac, Kittamaqua, in 1644.
Uttapoingassenem’s ascent to the newly-formed role of Tayac is said to have been entirely peaceful. He established political order through sheer leadership and character, rather than wars and force. Succession as was matrilineal, and persisted in official form until the death of Kittamaqua. The last recorded reference to a Piscataway Tayac was noted in Pittsburgh during a peace treaty signing by the Tayac named, “Old Sack”.
Piscataway Identity
Though referred to as Piscataway today, we did not refer to ourselves as such historically. Neither oral history nor post-contact records allude to a common name for the native people of southern Maryland prior to European contact. It was usual custom for native people to refer to themselves as ‘human beings’, ‘real people’, or just ‘people’ – in which case it is likely that they called themselves Nannuock (pronounced ‘NAN-oo-WOK’), which is an eastern Algonquian word meaning “people.”
Piscataways lived in villages that bore names describing the surrounding landscape or function of the village, for example:
- Mattawoman (a place to go peacefully/quietly)
- Najemoy (where raccoon nests)
- Tessamattock (road to the clearing in the briars)
- Pamonky (capitol town)
- Potobac (placid bay)
- Choptico (fast moving water)
Unlike European villages which remained fully populated and in-place year round, Piscataway villages were occupied year round only by elderly and very young children who could not travel to winter camps. Men and women often struck out in family groups in the fall from centrally located villages to establish smaller seasonal camps to hunt, cure hides, make clothing, gather firewood, and plan for the spring move back to the waters edge. In early spring the young men and women went to the villages to make repairs to the houses and fishing weirs in preparation for the village populace returning for fishing, ground clearing, planting, foraging for early fruits, reclaiming buried stores of seeds and dried foods. Sedentary villages could were often moved due to pest infestations, flash floods, exhausted soil, or raids. With seasonal rounds, the family (clan) was a far more permanent and important fixture of life than the village. Ask a Piscataway woman where she is from, and she is more likely to respond with the name of her clan than the name of her village.
The principal village occupied by the Tayac at the time of European contact was called Moyaone. This remained the Tayac’s residence until it was twice burned by Virginia colonists. The inhabitants moved away from Moyoane’s vulnerable location at the edge of the river, to establish a more defensible site further inland at the confluence of what are today called Piscataway Creek and Tinkers Creek. We called the place Piscataway – meaning “where the waters blend” – because of the blending of brackish and fresh water where the creeks join. ‘Piscataway’ was a term commonly used by Algonquian-speaking people in the eastern woodlands to denote this specific geographic feature. As such, our being termed ‘Piscataway’ as a tribe is a coincidence stemming from contact with Europeans, which is explained later in the story.
First Contacts with Europeans
Native people in Yagaocanahagary were familiar with Europeans long before the founding of Maryland. Spanish ships sailed into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers in the 1580s and established a short-lived camp in present-day Bladensburg. Later English traders like Henry Fleet, spent years trading with the tribes along the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. He would wind up being held prisoner for years by the Nacotchtank for attempting to go past that village to trade directly with tribes further north.
English and other merchants sailed into the Potomac to engage in trade at Nacotchtank – a large village that has been described as a 17th century Atlantic City. This enormous village stretched from Blue Plains near today’s Woodrow Wilson Bridge northward over what is now Bolling Air Force Base, then east on the Anacostia River to the site of today’s PEPCO plant on Benning Road. Nacotchtank was a major center of trade for native people throughout the east. European merchants that wanted to bypass the village to eliminate it as an intermediary in trading with tribes in the north and west were aggressively discouraged from doing so.
Some years later, William Claiborne – a Virginia colonist and merchant – would see the benefit in establishing a trading post in the Chesapeake Bay. He did so on what is known today as Kent Island, to trade directly with northern tribes for their superior fur pelts. This event had enormous consequences for the Piscataway, as Nacotchtank was eventually abandoned as trade dried up and tribes from the north, armed by Swedish and Dutch merchants, continually raided the village. They sought the protection of the Piscataway, moving south to the Accokeek area. Trade with the Swedes and Dutch would also provide northern tribes (Susquehanna and Iroquois) with staggering military superiority over the southern tribes, which would allow them to conduct countless raids into the south with virtual impunity (many of these raids were conducted to obtain captives and supplies to replenish their own losses from war and disease brought to their lands by Europeans). The Nacotchtank affair was the Piscataways’ first encounter with the results, both direct and indirect, of European contact. Though contemporary historians tend to argue that the inhabitants of Nacotchtank spoke Iroquoian languages and were under the protection of the northern tribes, the early record indicates otherwise:
- The Tayac, not the Iroquoian tribes, sent warriors to retaliate against Virginia Englishmen who raided Nacotchtank for its stores of corn. This incident would lead to English retaliation in the burning of Moyaone
- Northern tribes regularly attacked Nacotchtank as they did other southern tribes. The Necostans moved south to Accokeek seeking the protection of the Tayac
- Father Andrew White, a Jesuit who learned the Piscataway language and worked with the Necostan people at Nacotchtank, did not make mention of them speaking a different language
The company of colonists initially landed on what local Indians called Herron Island. The island is the site upon which Calvert took possession of land chartered to him by the King of England. After a brief ceremony, the island was named St. Clement. Jesuit priests in the company of the colonists conducted a mass and erected a large wooden cross (a large white cross stands on the island today, commemorating the event). Among these priests was Father Andrew White, who would receive notoriety in early colonial history for his interaction with the native people of southern Maryland. Particularly famous was his converting of the Tayac Kittamaqua to Christianity.
‘Whirlwind’ People
Calvert determined to locate his colony within a village of the Patuxent tribe and found both the people and the accommodations satisfactory. The ‘Proprietor’, as Calvert was known, would stake claim to his ‘Palatinate’ but, with good reason, would fail to inform the Tayac that he was dispossessing him of his country.
Piscataway lands were ceded in ever-increasing number to colonists through a series of treaties that exchanged these territories for military protection and guarantees of reserved lands for Indian dwelling, fishing, hunting and agriculture. It was under pressure to secure land from colonial encroachment that the Colonial Governor designated the Tayac as the single authority for dealing with the tribes in southern Maryland. The tribes would never recover from the disruption brought about by this decision. From that time the English insisted to use the term ‘Piscataway’ inclusively when referring to Indians in any southern part of the state. As more colonists entered the state, however, encroachment on reserved territory increased – particularly as colonial farmers allowed their horses, cows, and especially pigs to roam freely, trampling and eating native gardens. Indian retaliation against encroachment, usually in the form of slaughtering the offending animal or, in some cases, confronting the owners, was often used by the colonial government as an excuse to seize more Piscataway land. Faced with the impossible military superiority of the colonists in terms of numbers, resources, and technology, the native people had no choice but to retreat from the land they had occupied for centuries. The colonists further broke their treaties by failing to protect the Maryland Indians from the onslaught of northern tribes desperate for southern resources. Before long, the increasing aggression of both colonists and the northern tribes caused the Tayac to remove his people first to the Virginia side of the Potomac River, then to an island in the Potomac above the fall line (today known as Heaters Island). Many of the tribe’s members did not remove from southern Maryland, and many of those that did leave returned. The Choptico are said to have returned in full number and had among them the Tayac’s son.
The southern Maryland tribes would find themselves constantly on the move due to disease, encroachment, colonial aggression and manipulation, dishonest traders, dealers in liquor, and a lack of game animals to hunt. The constancy of movement would result in neighboring tribes naming us “Conoy”, an Iroquoian word meaning “whirlwind” or “that which moves about quickly.” While residing in Pennsylvania, tribal leaders of the Piscataway participated in and signed many treaties to which the Maryland Governor was a party. One such treaty called for the Governor of Maryland to allow tribal members remaining in Maryland to leave and join their relatives in Pennsylvania. The Governor agreed to do so, but he never issued passes that would allow our departure.
Attempts at Termination
The old historical record closes out on the “Piscataway/Conoy” with the signing of a treaty at Fort Pitt following the close of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War). The conclusion of the Seven Years War had drastic consequences for all Indians in the east, including the Piscataway. With the French and Spanish all but expelled from the continent, the English, followed by the Americans, were free to focus almost exclusively on the ‘Indian problem.’
The period prior to the war had been a struggle between European empires that the Indians buttressed against one another through trade and military alliances to ensure their survival. The period after the war presented a new model that was as simple as it was brutal: the war between empires was replaced with a race war. From this time until nearly a century after the close of the American Revolution, the historical record closes on Indians within the boundaries of the state as the government endeavored to destroy them either physically or demographically. To the casual student of history, it would seem that Indians in Maryland vanished into thin air after the Seven Years War.
Refusing to recognize any Indian leadership allowed the state to seize and dispose of land previously set aside under treaty for the use of Maryland’s Indian people. Subsequent wars and political machinations turned state attention and priorities to matters other than Indians, who were now inconsequential to its survival and did not pose a military threat. Maryland, like other colonies bent on terminating all things Indian in their states, used the opportunity following the Revolution to declare Indian people within its jurisdiction “extinct” as political entities. Many interpret that as being non existent. The rubric was to apply to a lack of political identity, but it instead became interpreted to mean they no longer existed as a race of people. State government records began referring to Indians as people of color, then as colored people, ultimately enumerating them among the African American population, in spite of protests from both sides.
Maryland Indians continued to identify themselves as such in spite of bureaucratic measures to prevent it. Authorities in schools and other government agencies refused to accept ‘Indian’ as a classification on official documents, often citing the fact that ‘Indian’ was not a legal classification on state forms. Maryland schools refused to identify children as Indian until a lawsuit filed in 1968 proved successful. To this day, the school system is reluctant to acknowledge its native students and include their history in statewide curriculum.
There are numerous works available from ethnographers, archaeologists, and historians that debate the idea of remnant groups of native people still existing within their original homelands. Throughout the east, remnant tribal groups must continue to survive attempts to eliminate them physically and demographically by state governments as well as social and religious organizations with political agendas.
Today’s Piscataway
Today there are several groups tracing their ancestry to the historic tribes of southern Maryland, but neither the state nor federal governments extends ‘official’ recognition to any of us. In 2004, Maryland’s Governor issued an Executive Order affording Maryland’s indigenous people the right to assert our Indian identity and the opportunity to receive services and participate as a minority in established programs as allowed by law, but did not extend recognition to the tribes. State law currently requires Federal or State recognition for Indian people to gain access to education, health, and economic programs for minorities under state agencies. In effect, this makes the Governor’s overture an empty gesture. The Maryland General Assembly established criteria for tribes to seek “State Recognition of Maryland Indian Status” after determining their lack of official status as Indians (and, therefore, as minorities) denied them access to programs.
Maryland’s native people continue to maintain their identity and culture without official recognition from the government, though we continue to seek the opportunities and benefits this status would bring us. Due to excessive social, political, and peer pressure on impressionable children and some adults, many of our members identify themselves as Black, White, Hispanic, or even Asian to avoid what to some is too often a burdensome and unneeded negative atmosphere fermented by the absence of “official” status as Indians.
