Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, Revised and Expanded Edition

Early English Effects on Virginia Algonquian Exchange and Tribute in the Tidewater Potomac

Early English Effects on Virginia Algonquian Exchange and Tribute in the Tidewater Potomac stephen r. potter Not long after an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the English colonists at Jamestown, in May of 1607, the paramount chief, or mamanatowick, of the Virginia Algonquians and his chiefs, or werowances, began trading with the English. In a scene replayed countless times, Indian maize was exchanged for European goods.1 Such exchanges were more than ritual expressions of professed friendship—they were attempts by both Europeans and Indians to control and benefit from one another through trade. From the perspective of the Algonquian werowances, this trade was a conscious effort to incorporate the strangers, or tassantasses, into the native system of exchange and tribute. It is my thesis that during earliest AngloIndian contact in Tidewater Virginia, the Algonquian werowances sought to control the flow of European goods into aboriginal society, much as they controlled the flow of luxury and status items gathered through tribute from their own people. As Anglo-Indian contact continued, Algonquian responses to the English differed depending upon their political relations with the Powhatan chiefdom of the James-York river basins and their distance from the earliest permanent English settlements. Among groups such as the Patawomekes, farther from both the Powhatan chiefdom and the Virginia English, the process of culture change was initially different even though the end result was the same—the collapse of centralized Algonquian political authority. This is most apparent in the English effects upon native systems of tribute and exchange, especially among peripheral chiefdoms like the Patawomekes. In the late 1500s and early 1600s, the southeastern Algonquian groups blanketed the temperate coastal plain of the mid-Atlantic from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and the tidewater regions of Maryland and Virginia to Albemarle and Pamlico sounds in North Carolina.2 They consisted of a series of ranked, kin-oriented societies living in semipermanent villages    early english effects and hamlets composed of arborlike structures made of poles covered with bark or cane mats. The villages, situated near streams and rivers, were surrounded by extensive fields of maize and beans, maintained through slashand -burn techniques. Smaller garden plots of squash, pumpkins, gourds, sunflowers, and tobacco were tended near the longhouses. Agricultural harvests were supplemented by communal deer hunts, solitary stalking of game, harvesting marine and estuarine fish and mollusks, and gathering a host of plant foods. Their social and political organization featured rank-differentiated roles and functions, dress, and burial customs; polygyny; matrilineal descent of chieftains; tribute systems; and trade monopolies.3 Although the degree of social and political centralization varied among these groups, all of them manifested what Marshall Sahlins describes as “a system of chieftainship , a hierarchy of major and minor authorities holding forth over major and minor subdivisions of the tribe: a chain of command linking paramount to middle range and local level leaders.”4 The largest and most centralized of the southeastern Algonquian polities was the Powhatan chiefdom, named for the paramount chief who ruled the majority of Virginia Algonquians at the time of English colonization in 1607. The apical status position of paramount chief was occupied by Powhatan , or Wahunsonacock, from about 1572 until 1617.5 From this position of authority, Powhatan served as a mediator between the secular and the sacred, as both a peace-chief and priest. Subordinate to Powhatan were the werowances who ruled the local groups. If there was more than one village in a group’s territory, then subchiefs, or “lesser werowances,” governed the villages where the werowance did not reside. It is likely that the werowances were peace-chiefs, concerned generally with internal matters. Conversely , the English mentioned captains or war-chiefs, who probably handled certain external affairs. As Frederic Gleach observed, “the distinction between peace-chief and war-chief is common among Algonquian groups and in the Southeast; the position of war-chief was achieved by a demonstration of bravery and ability to lead, and not inherited.”6 Nonchiefly, high-status positions included advisers, priests, and distinguished warriors. Commoners and war captives occupied the bottom two positions within the social hierarchy.7 Although the position of werowance was hereditarily ascribed (at least by the early seventeenth century), social rank was maintained and reaffirmed  stephen r. potter by the accumulation and control of wealth.8 Indeed, the Algonquian word werowance has been variously interpreted as meaning “he is rich,” “he is of influence,” or “he...