Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion

"Scatter’d upon the English Seats”

Scatter’d upon the English Seats” Indian Identity and Land Occupancy in the Rappahannock River Valley Edward DuBois Ragan Attachment to place was and remains the core of Rappahannock Indian identity. The Rappahannock’s sense of place along the Virginia river that bears their name shaped their sense of themselves, their community, and their place in the world. When external forces threatened the Rappahannock , they typically responded with varying degrees of accommodation and resistance. For example, before English settlement, the Rappahannock participated with other Tidewater Algonquians in a broad shared regional culture , just as they resisted Powhatan’s efforts to dominate them socially and politically. After English settlement, the Rappahannock continued to seek balance between accommodation and resistance, just as English settlement threatened the Rappahannock’s commitment to place. This central tension centered on the Rappahannock’s commitment to remain mobile within their ancestral homeland and to resist the fixity that Virginia’s provincial authorities tried to impose. Provincial authorities wanted mapped, bounded Indian towns, which opened frontier land for English settlement and consolidated “neighbor” Indians as a frontier defense for settlers against “foreign ”Indians who lived beyond the frontier.The Virginia General Assembly further insisted that it approve tribal chiefs and councilors and that Indian children be sent to live and work as servants in English homes.The Rappahannock refused these conditions. Instead, they secluded themselves in the remote uplands of those “English Seats,” where they avoided fixed towns and having their community leaders approved. By the eighteenth century, Anglo-Virginian observers often interpreted Indians’ flexible communities as “scatter’d,”which then became evidence of indigenous decline and disap- 208 / Edward DuBois Ragan pearance. But the Rappahannock did not disappear. Instead, they continued to live as they had before English settlement. The Rappahannock passively resisted outsiders and only accommodated colonial Indian policy when absolutely necessary.¹ For as long as Algonquian people lived along the Rappahannock River, they modified their settlement patterns in response to changing environmental conditions. When the climate was warm and the rains regular, extended families built their towns and planted their crops in the alluvial soils along the banks of tidal creeks and rivers. During droughts, Algonquians relocated to the ridgelines between the tidal rivers and dispersed into settlements of from one to three families.² The clay soil of the ridge accommodated drier climates by retaining more moisture so that during droughts, the Rappahannock could continue to plant their corn and feed their families . These dispersed settlements did not diminish the group, and when environmental conditions improved, the people returned from the ridgeline to the river and re-established their larger villages. Throughout the Middle and Late Woodland Periods, or from a.d. 200 to 1600, settlement sizes and locations in the Tidewater continued to ebb and flow as groups’ residential patterns fluctuated in response to periodic environmental and human stress. Around a.d. 200, settlements consisted of both small and intermediatesized sites. These sites typically contained from one to six households and were located both along rivers and in the interior along the ridges of elevated necklands, where freshwater springs fed the brackish tidal rivers. These intermediate-sized sites functioned as base camps during the fall and winter and perhaps into the early spring. Then populations dispersed to smaller sites to exploit particular resources. Some of these smaller, singlehousehold settlements were located in the interior uplands, where each person performed his or her gender-specific job. Men and older boys hunted bear, fowl, and deer. Women and children foraged for nuts and medicinal herbs and collected firewood and building materials, such as saplings and elm bark for houses and cedar bark for cordage. Other families dispersed along marshes, rivers, and creeks. There, men foraged for shellfish and caught fish, such as shad, herring, and sturgeon.Women collected reeds for mats and foraged for starchy tubers like tuckahoe.These settlement and subsistence patterns were adaptations to a cooler, drier climate, so that living in small and intermediate-sized settlements was one response to environmental stress.³ Beginning about a.d. 645, warmer temperatures and more rain seem to “Scatter’d upon the English Seats” / 209 have stimulated a growth in settlement sizes. The remains of larger villages have been found on the necklands near coves and along the embayments of tributaries.4 Men, women, and children still went out to occupy and exploit smaller, seasonal sites, but there seems to have been a core of...