Piscataway Indian Nation
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The Piscataway Indian Nation is a non-state, non-federally recognized Native American tribal nation, which, at one time, was one of the most populous and powerful Native polities of the Chesapeake region. By the early seventeenth century, the Piscataway had come to exercise hegemony over other Native American groups on the north bank of the Potomac River. While Piscataway fortunes declined as Maryland colony grew and prospered, the Piscataway continue to be leaders among the tribal nations of Maryland, as well as throughout Indian Country in their commitment to Indigenous and Human Rights.
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[edit] Geography
The Piscataway Indian Nation is a long-established tribal nation of Native Americans inhabiting traditional homelands on the western shore of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay in the areas of Charles County, Prince George's County, and St. Mary's County, located near two metropolitan areas, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
[edit] Government
The current chief of the Piscataway Indian Nation is Billy Redwing Tayac, an outspoken leader in the movement for Indigenous and Human Rights, and the son of the late Chief Turkey Tayac, a prominent figure in the Native American revitalization and reclamation movements of the last half of the twentieth century. There are also two other organized tribal groups that have emerged representing Piscataway people including the Piscataway-Conoy Tribe, led by Mrs. Mervin Savoy and the Cedarville Band of Piscataways, led by Natalie Proctor.
[edit] History
Anthropologists and historians contend that the ancestors of the Piscataway came to the Potomac River region roughly ten thousand years ago, and coalesced into a nation comprised of numerous settlements sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. After excavating ancient sites in the traditional homeland of the Piscataway, archaeologists generally posit that sometime around 800 C.E., peoples living along the Potomac had begun to experiment with maize as a supplement to their ordinary hunting-gathering diet of fish, game, and wild plants.
[edit] The Indigenous Chesapeake
Other evidence suggests that the Piscataway migrated from the Eastern Shore, or from the upper Potomac, or from sources hundreds of miles to the north. It is fairly certain however, that by the sixteenth century, the Piscataway were a distinct polity with a distinct society and culture who lived year-round in permanent villages.
In fact, by 1500, the Piscataway and their Algonquian neighbors had become so numerous that they gradually supplemented their hunting-gathering subsistance economy with increasingly sophisticated agricultural forms of production. Cultivating vast fields of calorie-rich maize, squash, and beans -- the production and distribution of which was controlled and facilitated by women -- the Piscataway and other related Algonquian peoples were able to feed their growing communities, even as they continued gathering wild plants from nearby freshwater marshes, and men cleared new fields, hunted, and fished.
The onset of a centuries-long "Little Ice Age" sometime in 1300, had driven Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples from upland and northern communities southward to the warmer climate of the Potomac basin, where growing seasons were still long enough to grow maize. The increasing conflict over territory was enormously destructive; indeed, by 1600, incursions from Iroquoian peoples from the north had almost entirely destroyed many of the settlements above present-day Great Falls, Virginia.
Algonquian villages below the fall line survived by consolidating authority in the hands of hereditary chiefs who exacted tribute, sent men to war, and coordinated the resistance against northern incursions and rival claimants to their homelands. A hierarchy of places and rulers emerged: hamlets without hereditary rulers paid tribute to a nearby village whose chief, or "werowance," appointed a "lesser king" to each dependent settlement. With political change came changes in social structure and religious evolutions that exalted By the end of the sixteenth century, each werowance on the north bank of the Potomac was in turn subject to a single paramount chief: the ruler of the Piscataways, known as the "Tayac."
[edit] English Colonization
When English colonials such as Captain John Smith began to visit the Potomac in 1608, rivals and reluctant subjects of the Tayac hoped that the newcomers would alter the balance of power in the region. This strategy worked: the Virginia Company, and later, Virginia Colony, in search of trading partners, consistently allied themselves with Piscataway enemies. By the early 1630s, the Tayac's hold over some of his subordinate werowances had weakened considerably. But when the English began to colonize what is now Maryland, the Tayac managed to turn the newcomers into allies. Granting the English an Indian settlement that the English re-named after their own monarch, St. Mary's City, the Tayac also intended that the new colonial outpost now serve him as a buffer against Susquehannock incursions from the north.
Any benefits to having the English as allies and buffers were short-lived. Maryland Colony was initially too weak to pose a significant threat, but once the English transitioned from establishing a beach-head to developing a colony, they turned against the Piscataway. By 1668 western shore Algonquians were confined to two reservations: one on the Wicomico River, the other, on those settlements that comprised a portion of the Piscataway homeland. Refugees from dispossessed Algonquian nations coalesced with the Piscataway. Colonial authorities even forced the Piscataway to permit the hated Susquehannock, an Iroquoian people, to relocate to their own territory after the defeat of the Susquehannock by the Haudenosaunee. This unhappy compromise only escalated hostilities that eventually culminated in war, so that by 1675, the Susquehannock were expelled from Maryland Colony. The Iroquoian Susquehannock had suffered a devastating defeat, first through a callous act of English treachery, and thereafter, by Piscataway warriors who leapt at the opportunity to attack their traditional enemy.
Making their way northward, the Susquehannock joined forces with the Haudenosaunee, and returned, time, and time again, to attack the Piscataway. Though they were still allies, the English provided little help to the Piscataway. Maryland Colony increasingly sought to wrest control of Piscataway land rather than serve as allies of a sovereign people. By the end of the sixteenth century, some Piscataway families relocated northward, along the Potomac to escape the encroaching English.
[edit] The Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some Piscataway families, as well as other fleeing Algonquian groups relocated once again, this time to the Susquehanna River. Known now as the "Conoy," they sought the protection of the powerful Haudenosaunee, but even Pennsylvania Colony proved unsafe. While families of Conoy Indians resumed a northward trajectory, and resettled in New France, others may have moved south toward Virginia Colony, and merged with the Meherrin. Today, the descendants of these migrants live on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada.
According to numerous historians and archeologists including Dr. William H. Gilbert, Dr. Frank G. Speck, Dr. Helen Rountree, Dr. Lucille St. Hoyme, Dr. Paul Cissna, Dr. T. Dale Stewart, Dr. Christopher Goodwin, Dr. Christian Feest, and Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, a small group of Piscataway families continued to live in their homeland. Though destroyed as an independent, sovereign polity, the Piscataway survived, and resettled into rural farm life as free people of color.
In the late nineteenth century, a number of people reported to archeologists, journalists, and anthropologists that they descended from tribes associated with the old Piscataway chiefdom. A core group of families was also identified as Indians by the Catholic Church. The group was also frequently identified as a tri-racial folk community called Wesorts. It was in this context that a man named Phillip Sheridan Proctor was born in 1895. Proctor, who began using a name that he reported to be handed to him based on his Piscataway lineage, took on the title, Turkey Tayac. Tayac was instrumental in the revival of American Indian culture throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast.
In the late 1990s, a Maryland-state appointed committee including a genealogical scholar from the Maryland State Archives validated these families claims to Piscataway heritage after exhaustively reviewing thousands of pages of primary evidence. This academic finding firmly refuted what the modern Piscataway believe to be an ethnic defamation campaign shown by the self-published internet papers by Lea C. Sims and Thomas F. Brown, distributed at the height of controversies surrounding recognition and land reclamation. Similar derogatory papers were published on tribal groups of tri-racial heritage including the Lumbee. In contrast, a fresh approach to the intersections of African and Indian identities is being taken which show how archaic and racialist Brown's and Sims' work is since it emphasizes 19th century categories in the current project at Haskell Indian Nations University.
Although a few families identified themselves as Piscataway Indians by the early twentieth century, prevailing racialist attitudes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Jim Crow policies of the twentieth century determined ethnic and cultural identification in post-American Revolution Maryland. With the enforcement of the "one-drop rule," anyone with a discernable amount of African ancestry would be classified as "negro," "mulatto," or "black," thereby discounting any other ancestry. Moreover, with the nullification of Native American identity through census enumeration and state legislation, any standing Native American treaty rights were that much easier to abrogate. Thus, when Native American reservations were dissolved by the colonial government of Maryland in the eighteenth century, and when the Piscataway were reclassified as "free negro" or "mulatto" on state and federal census records in the nineteenth century, a process of detribalization was set into motion the implications of which were carried well into the twentieth century. Contradictorily, while the Piscataway were enumerated as "mulattos" in state and federal census records, Catholic parish records and ethnographic reports continued to identify the Piscataway as Indians.
[edit] Piscataway Revival
Chief Turkey Tayac (born Phillip Proctor) was a prominent figure in the early and mid-twentieth century cultural revitalization movements not only among the Piscataway, but also among remnant Southeastern Native American communities, including the Lumbee, Nanticoke, and Powhatan Indians of the Atlantic coastal plain. Almost one century ago, and with only a third grade education, the innovative, self-deterministic leadership-style of Chief Turkey Tayac began the process of cultural revitalization and self-determination that continues to mark contemporary efforts of Piscataway Indians. Assuming the traditional leadership title, "tayac" during an era when Native Americans were increasingly being regulated by blood quantum outlined in the Indian Reorganization Act, Chief Turkey Tayac organized a movement for Native American peoples that privileged self-ascriptive forms of identification. As reported by Dr. Malinda Maynor, a Lumbee professor at Harvard University, Tayac took the position that only American Indians should have the right to recognize other American Indians.
Today, as over the centuries, the Piscataway Indian Nation is struggling to be acknowledged as a sovereign indigenous presence in their own Chesapeake homeland. Over time, and like many non-recognized tribal peoples along the Atlantic seaboard, they are especially vulnerable to racialized attacks on their indigenous identity due to their mixed race ancestry. Contemporary social science argues that ethnicity is not only biological, but cultural. Thus, the adherance to a unique indigenous identity cannot be cancelled by other genetic ancestries. The Piscataway today make the case that their survival should celebrated rather than degraded. Like Native American peoples all over the United States, the Piscataway Indian tribal nation is enjoying a renaissance, through the efforts of these modern day revivalists.
[edit] Sources
- Barbour, Philip L. The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964.
- ______. ed. The Jamestown Voyages Under the First Charter, 1606-1609. 2 vols. Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, 2nd series nos. 136-137. Cambridge, England, 1969.
- Chambers, Mary E. and Robert L. Humphrey. Ancient Washington—American Indian Cultures of the Potomac Valley. George Washington University, Washington, D.C. 1977.
- Goddard, Ives (1978). “Eastern Algonquian Languages.” In Bruce Trigger (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15 (Northeast). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, pp. 70-77.
- Griffin, James B. "Eastern North American Prehistory: A Summary." Science 156 (1967):175-191.
- Hertzberg, Hazel. The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan Indian Movements. NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971.
- Merrell, James H. "Cultural Continuity Among the Piscataway Indians of Colonial Maryland." William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 36 (1979): 548-70.
- Potter, Stephen R. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
- Tayac, Gabrielle. "National Museum of the American Indian ? 'We Rise, We Fall, We Rise' ? a Piscataway Descendant Bears Witness at a Capital Groundbreaking." Smithsonian 35, no. 6 (2004): 63-66.
