Piscataway people

Native American ethnic group

The Piscataway /p//ɪ//s/'/k//æ//t//ə/,/w//eɪ/ or Piscatawa /p//ɪ//s/'/k//æ//t//ə/,/w//eɪ//, /,/p//ɪ//s//k//ə/'/t//ɑː//w//ə/, are Native Americans. They spoke Algonquian Piscataway, a dialect of Nanticoke. One of their neighboring tribes, with whom they merged after a massive decline of population following two centuries of interactions with European settlers, called them the Conoy. Two major groups representing Piscataway descendants received state recognition as Native American tribes in 2012: the Piscataway Indian Nation and Tayac Territory and the Piscataway Conoy Tribe of Maryland. Within the latter group was included the Piscataway Conoy Confederacy and Sub Tribes and the Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians. All these groups are located in Southern Maryland. None are federally recognized.

The Piscataway were recorded by the English (in days before uniform spelling) as the Pascatowies, Paschatoway, Pazaticans, Pascoticons, Paskattaway, Pascatacon, Piscattaway, and Puscattawy. They were also referred to by the names of their villages: Moyaone, Accotick, or Accokicke, or Accokeek; Potapaco, or Portotoack; Sacayo, or Sachia; Zakiah, and Yaocomaco, or Youcomako, or Yeocomico, or Wicomicons. Related Algonquian speaking tribes included the Anacostan, Chincopin, Choptico, Doeg, or Doge, or Taux; Tauxeneen, Mattawoman, and Pamunkey. More distantly related tribes included the Accomac, Assateague, Choptank, Nanticoke, Patuxent, Pocomoke, Tockwogh and Wicomoco.

The Piscataway language was part of the large Algonquian language family. Jesuit missionary Father Andrew White translated the Catholic catechism into Piscataway in 1640, and other English missionaries compiled Piscataway language materials.

The Piscataway by 1600 were on primarily the north bank of the Potomac River in what is now Charles, southern Prince George's, and probably some of western St. Mary's counties in southern Maryland, according to John Smith's 1608 map, "wooded; near many waterways". This also notes the several Patuxent River settlements that were under some degree of Piscataway suzerainty. The Piscataway settlements appear in that same area on maps through 1700. Piscataway descendants now inhabit part of their traditional homelands in these areas. None of the three state recognized tribes noted above has a reservation or trust land. Their status as "landless" Indians had contributed to their difficulty in proving historical continuity and being recognized as self governing tribes.

The Piscataway relied more on agriculture than did many of their neighbors, which enabled them to live in permanent villages. They lived near waters navigable by canoes. Their crops included maize, several varieties of beans, melons, pumpkins, squash and (ceremonial) tobacco, which were bred and cultivated by women. Men used bows and arrows to hunt bear, elk, deer, and wolves, as well as smaller game such as beaver, squirrels, partridges, and wild turkeys. They also did fishing and oyster and clam harvesting. Women also gathered berries, nuts and tubers in season to supplement their diets. As was common among the Algonquian peoples, Piscataway villages consisted of several individual houses protected by a defensive log palisade. Traditional houses were rectangular and typically 10 feet high and 20 feet long, a type of longhouse, with barrel shaped roofs covered with bark or woven mats. A hearth occupied the center of the house with a smoke hole overhead.

A succession of Indigenous peoples occupied the Chesapeake and Tidewater region, arriving according to archeologists' estimates from roughly 3,000 to 10,000 years ago. Those people of Algonquian stock who would coalesce into the Piscataway nation, lived in the Potomac River drainage area since at least AD 1300. Sometime around AD 800, peoples living along the Potomac had begun to cultivate maize as a supplement to their ordinary hunting gathering diet of fish, game, and wild plants. Some evidence suggests that the Piscataway migrated from the Eastern Shore, or from the upper Potomac, or from sources hundreds of miles to the north. It is fairly certain, however, that by the 16th century the Piscataway was a distinct polity with a distinct society and culture, who lived year round in permanent villages. The onset of a centuries long "Little Ice Age" after 1300 had driven Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples from upland and northern communities southward to the warmer climate of the Potomac basin. Growing seasons there were long enough for them to cultivate maize. As more tribes occupied the area, they competed for resources and had an increasing conflict. By 1400, the Piscataway and their Algonquian tribal neighbors had become increasingly numerous because of their sophisticated agriculture, which provided calorie rich maize, beans and squash. These crops added surplus to their hunting gathering subsistence economy and supported greater populations. The women cultivated and processed numerous varieties of maize and other plants, breeding them for taste and other characteristics. The Piscataway and other related peoples were able to feed their growing communities. They also continued to gather wild plants from nearby freshwater marshes. The men cleared new fields, hunted, and fished.

By 1600, incursions by the Susquehannock and other Iroquoian peoples from the north had almost entirely destroyed many of the Algonquian settlements above present day Great Falls, Virginia on the Potomac River. The villages below the fall line survived by banding together for the common defense. They gradually consolidated authority under hereditary chiefs, who exacted tribute, sent men to war, and coordinated the resistance against northern incursions and rival claimants to the lands. A hierarchy of places and rulers emerged: hamlets without hereditary rulers paid tribute to a nearby village. Its chief, or werowance, appointed a "lesser king" to each dependent settlement. Changes in social structure occurred and religious development exalted the hierarchy. By the end of the 16th century, each werowance on the north bank of the Potomac was subject to the paramount chief: the ruler of the Piscataway known as the Tayac. The English explorer Captain John Smith first visited the upper Potomac River in 1608. He recorded the Piscataway by the name Moyaons, after their "king's house", i. e., capital village or Tayac's residence, also spelled Moyaone, located at Accokeek Creek Site at Piscataway Park. Closely associated with them were the Nacotchtank people (Anacostans) who lived around present day Washington, DC, and the Taux (Doeg) on the Virginia side of the river. Rivals and reluctant subjects of the Tayac hoped that the English newcomers would alter the balance of power in the region. In search of trading partners, particularly for furs, the Virginia Company, and later, Virginia Colony, consistently allied with enemies of the settled Piscataway. Their entry into the dynamics began to shift regional power. By the early 1630s, the Tayac's hold over some of his subordinate werowances had weakened considerably. However, when the English began to colonize what is now Maryland in 1634, the Tayac Kittamaquund managed to turn the newcomers into allies. He had come to power that year after killing his brother Wannas, the former Tayac. He granted the English a former Indian settlement, which they renamed St. Mary's City after Queen Henrietta Marie, the wife of King Charles I. The Tayac intended the new colonial outpost to serve as a buffer against the Iroquoian Susquehannock incursions from the north. Kittamaquund and his wife converted to Christianity in 1640 by their friendship with the English Jesuit missionary Father Andrew White, who also performed their marriage. They were said to have had three or four children together. Brent married again in 1654, so his child bride may have died young. Benefits to the Piscataway in having the English as allies and buffers were short lived. The Maryland Colony was initially too weak to pose a significant threat. Once the English began to develop a stronger colony, they turned against the Piscataway. By 1668, the western shore Algonquian were confined to two reservations, one on the Wicomico River and the other on a portion of the Piscataway homeland. Refugees from dispossessed Algonquian nations merged with the Piscataway. Colonial authorities forced the Piscataway to permit the Susquehannock, an Iroquoian speaking people, to settle in their territory after having been defeated in 1675 by the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee), based in New York. The traditional enemies eventually came to open conflict in present day Maryland. With the tribes at war, the Maryland Colony expelled the Susquehannock after they had been attacked by the Piscataway. The Susquehannock suffered a devastating defeat. Making their way northward, the surviving Susquehannock joined forces with their former enemy, the Haudenosaunee, the five nation Iroquois Confederacy. Together, the Iroquoian tribes returned repeatedly to attack the Piscataway. The English provided little help to their Piscataway allies. Rather than raise a militia to aid them, the Maryland Colony continued to compete for control of Piscataway land. Piscataway fortunes declined as the English Maryland colony grew and prospered. They were especially adversely affected by epidemics of infectious disease, which decimated their population, as well as by intertribal and colonial warfare. After the English tried to remove tribes from their homelands in 1680, the Piscataway fled from encroaching English settlers to Zekiah Swamp in Charles County, Maryland. There they were attacked by the Iroquois but peace was negotiated. In 1697, the Piscataway relocated across the Potomac and camped near what is now The Plains, Virginia, in Fauquier County. Virginia settlers were alarmed and tried to persuade the Piscataway to return to Maryland, though they refused. Finally in 1699, the Piscataway moved north to what is now called Heater's Island (formerly Conoy Island) in the Potomac near Point of Rocks, Maryland. They remained there until after 1722.

In the 18th century, the Maryland Colony nullified all Indian claims to their lands and dissolved the reservations. By the 1720s, some Piscataway as well as other Algonquian groups had relocated to Pennsylvania just north of the Susquehannah River. These migrants from the general area of Maryland are referred to as the Conoy and the Nanticoke. They were spread along the western edge of the Pennsylvania Colony, along with the Algonquian Lenape who had moved west from modern New Jersey, the Tutelo, the Shawnee and some Iroquois. The Piscataway were said to number only about 150 people at that time. They sought the protection of the powerful Haudenosaunee, but the Pennsylvania Colony also proved unsafe. Most of the surviving tribe migrated north in the late eighteenth century and were last noted in the historical record in 1793 at Detroit, following the American Revolutionary War, when the United States gained independence. In 1793 a conference in Detroit reported the peoples had settled in Upper Canada, joining other Native Americans who had been allies of the British in the conflict. Today, descendants of the northern migrants live on the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation reserve in Ontario, Canada. Some Piscataway may have moved south toward the Virginia Colony. They were believed to have merged with the Meherrin.

Numerous contemporary historians and archaeologists, including William H. Gilbert, Frank G. Speck, Helen Rountree, Lucille St. Hoyme, Paul Cissna, T. Dale Stewart, Christopher Goodwin, Christian Feest, James Rice, and Gabrielle Tayac, have documented that a small group of Piscataway families continued to live in their homeland. Although the larger tribe was destroyed as an independent, sovereign polity, descendants of the Piscataway survived. They formed unions with others in the area, including European indentured servants and free or enslaved Africans. They settled into rural farm life and were classified as free people of color, but some kept Native American cultural traditions. For years the United States censuses did not have separate categories for Indians. Especially in the slave states, all free people of color were classified together as black, in the hypodescent classification resulting from the racial caste of slavery. In the late 19th century, archaeologists, journalists, and anthropologists interviewed numerous residents in Maryland who claimed descent from tribes associated with the former Piscataway chiefdom. Uniquely among most institutions, the Catholic Church consistently continued to identify Indian families by that classification in their records. Such church records became valuable resources for scholars and family and tribal researchers. Anthropologists and sociologists categorized the self identified Indians as a tri racial community. They were commonly called a name (regarded as derogatory by some) "Wesorts." In the 19th century, census enumerators classified most of the Piscataway individuals as "free people of color", "Free Negro" or "mulatto" on state and federal census records, largely because of their intermarriage with blacks and Europeans. The dramatic drop in Native American populations due to infectious disease and warfare, plus a racial segregation based on slavery, led to a binary view of race in the former colony. By contrast, Catholic parish records in Maryland and some ethnographic reports accepted Piscataway self identification and continuity of culture as Indians, regardless of mixed ancestry. Such a binary division of society in the South increased after the American Civil War and the emancipation of slaves. Southern whites struggled to regain political and social dominance of their societies during and after the Reconstruction era. They were intent on controlling the freedmen and asserting white supremacy.

These are historical Piscataway people. List any modern or living Piscataway people under their specific tribe. Mary Kittamaquund (c. 1634–c. 1654/1700), daughter of tribal leader, Kittamaquund
Turkey Tayac (Phillip Sheridan Proctor) (1895–1978), tribal leader and herbal doctor.