Word: powhatan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...five years after the settlers arrived, the weaknesses of the Powhatan started to show. For one thing, after 1610, Chief Powhatan began to feel his age. He became less decisive and more wishful for peace in his last years (he died in 1618). Meanwhile, the English population advantage back home began to take effect after 1610, when a reorganized Jamestown colony with better supply lines began to establish satellite settlements on Powhatan farmland. The squatters, as the Powhatan saw them, became so numerous that they could not be repelled. Even all-out war, which raged twice, did not stanch...
...expansion of English settlements produced yet another disadvantage for the Powhatan: more cleared land, which helped the English weaponry come into its own. The introduction of snaphance guns in the 1620s, eliminating the need for keeping separate matches alight, consolidated that advantage. By then, of course, Powhatan men were taking and using any guns they could lay hands on, but it was too late...
...Powhatan gradually became confined to their homeland, their attitude toward land began to work against them. Traditionally farmland was "owned" only while it was being worked. Otherwise, like the forest and waterways, it was "public" land, on which any family could forage. In their world, with its relatively small populations, there was always more land to move to. That ceased to be the case when enough aliens had settled in, aliens who insisted that they owned "their" land forever and that no one could trespass on it. It was not until late in the 17th century, when they had lost...
...Powhatan were never obliterated, however. Nor were they pushed into "praying towns" or "removed" westward. Boarding schools to force Indian children to assimilate were few in Virginia. Instead, the nearly landless people reluctantly adopted English ways from their neighbors in the 18th century and went right on surviving in their homeland. They are still with us today: two reservations, plus five nonreservation tribes...
Rountree, an anthropologist, is the author of Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown