All about the ancient tribes
Born around 1596, Pocahontas was the daughter of Wahunsenaca (also known as Powhatan ), the powerful chief of the Powhatans, a Native American group that inhabited the Chesapeake Bay region. Little is known about her mother.
Many of the Powhatan tribes no longer existed by 1722. The Rappahannocks lost their reservation shortly after 1700; the Chickahominies lost their reservation in 1718; and the Nansemonds sold their reservation in 1792. The Pamunkey and Mattaponi reservations are two of the oldest in the nation.
The Powhatan Indians were a group of Eastern Woodland Indians who occupied the coastal plain of Virginia. They were sometimes referred to as Algonquians because of the Algonquian language they spoke and because of their common culture. Some words we use today, such as moccasin and tomahawk, came from this language.
John Smith Came to the Powhatan When Pocahontas Was about 9 or 10. According to Mattaponi oral history, little Matoaka was possibly about 10 years old when John Smith and English colonists arrived in Tsenacomoca in the spring of 1607. John Smith was about 27 years old. They were never married nor involved.
As I said before Matoaka ( Pocahontas ) is a great hero who saved John Smith’s life, united the English and the Powhatan Indians, and how she went to Virginia to raise money for her homeland.
The only life portrait of Pocahontas (1595–1617) and the only credible image of her, was engraved by Simon Van de Passe in 1616 while she was in England, and was published in John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia in 1624. Then Pocahontas warned Smith of another plot to kill him.
The Powhatans lost their political independence after being defeated by the English in the 1644-46 Anglo- Powhatan War. Powhatans continued to live in the Virginia coastal plain as they had done for centuries, but after the war, their chiefs ruled under the authority of the English royal governor.
The term “princess” was often mistakenly applied to the daughters of tribal chiefs or other community leaders by early American colonists who mistakenly believed that Indigenous people shared the European system of royalty.
Treaty of 1646 In October 1646 the General Assembly of Virginia signed a peace treaty with Necotowance, King of the Indians, which brought the Third Anglo- Powhatan War to an end. In the treaty, the tribes of the Confederacy became tributaries to the King of England, paying a yearly tribute to the Virginia governor.
The impacts the War of 1812 had on tribes were simply devastating. Losing Indian lands resulted in a loss of cultural identity, as tribes relied on their homelands as the place of ancestral burial locations and sacred sites where religious ceremonies were performed.
The Powhatan people spoke a form of Eastern Algonquian, a family of languages used by various tribes along the Atlantic Coast from North Carolina to Canada, and had no form of written communication.
At the time English colonists arrived in the spring of 1607, coastal Virginia was inhabited by the Powhatan Indians, an Algonquian-speaking people.
4. Myth 4: Pocahontas and Smith fell in love. Despite what Disney (and numerous authors going back to the early 1800s) would have you believe, there is no historical basis for the claim that Pocahontas and Smith were romantically involved.
Captain John Smith described Pocahontas as being 11 years old when she saved him. He was hurt in an accident 1 and 1/2 years later and had to leave to go home. Captain John Smith never married Pocahontas. Pocahontas married Master John Rolfe in 1614..