Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson

A Note on Language and Usage

a ฀ n o t e ฀ o n ฀ l a n g u a g e ฀ a n d ฀ u s a g e This book is primarily an environmental history, but it is largely peopled by Native Americans. Any attempt at writing about Indians raises certain questions about language, which ought to be addressed at the outset. For example, should one speak of “Native Americans”? “Indians”? “First Nations”? “Indigenous People ”? Wherever possible I have avoided all of those terms, preferring to highlight specific individuals, communities, or nations. When necessary I refer to “the Potomac nations” or to “Algonquians” (by which I mean the people living around the Potomac and its tributaries rather than the larger linguistic family that spreads across much of North America). If called upon to generalize even more broadly, I use “Indians,” “Native Americans,” and “Natives” interchangeably . All are inadequate terms to capture the variety of experiences they are supposed to cover, but they nevertheless are common usage.1 Native names and terms can be difficult to pronounce and to remember, but, to quote the poet Robert Bringhurst, using them is “an essential gesture of respect and recognition—one I hope most readers of this book will want to make.” The many Indian nations, individuals, and place names used in this book can be confusing, not because of any inherent difficulty lying in those names, waiting to trip us up, but rather because we don’t often hear or read them. That the Native American material is less familiar, however, is simply another indication of how important it is to redress the balance.2 Another“essential gesture of respect and recognition”is using the plural form when referring to Native groups.Although it has long been conventional to write of “the Powhatan” rather than “the Powhatans,” using the singular form when referring to whole groups of Native people strikes me as ungrammatical and misleading; it implies a homogeneity and timelessness to Native communities and cultures that have never existed. As historian Daniel K. Richter notes, if we are going to use the singular form for Native groups, we should do the same for non-Natives, as in “the German were reunited in 1990.”3 I have retained the original spelling and punctuation of all sources, partly to avoid tampering with the authors’ observations, partly to invoke the very foreign nature of the world they inhabited, and partly to serve as a reminder that we are often seeing that world through the distorting lens of their necessarily imperfect understandings. I have, however, silently modernized capitalization and have omitted italics except where the author clearly meant to use them for emphasis. I have also filled out abbreviations and converted archaic characters to their modern equivalents, so that, for example,“ye” is rendered as “the,” and “condiçon” as “condition.” I have also partially modernized dates. The British stuck with the “Old Style”Julian calendar until 1752, which meant that the new year began on 25 March rather than 1 January. I have converted dates falling between 1 January and 25 March so that the Powhatan uprising of 22 March 1621 (Old Style) is recorded here as having taken place on 22 March 1622. When the British switched to the Gregorian calendar, they also skipped eleven days to make up for the distortions created by the Julian year,which was slightly longer than the lunar year,but I have made no effort to correct for those eleven days: 22 March remains 22 March. xiv A Note on Language and Usage Nature & History in the Potomac Country This page intentionally left blank ...