Piscataway Indian Nation and Tayac Territory
The Piscataway Indian Nation is a non-state, non-federally recognized Native American tribal nation, which, at one time, was one of the most populous and powerful Native polities of the Chesapeake region. By the early seventeenth century, the Piscataway had come to exercise hegemony over other Native American groups on the north bank of the Potomac River. While Piscataway fortunes declined as Maryland colony grew and prospered, the Piscataway continue to be leaders among the tribal nations of Maryland, as well as throughout Indian Country in their commitment to Indigenous and Human Rights.
Geography
The Piscataway Indian Nation is a long-established tribal nation of Native Americans inhabiting traditional homelands on the western shore of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay in the areas of Charles County, Prince George's County, and St. Mary's County, located near two metropolitan areas, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
Government
The current chief of the Piscataway Indian Nation is Billy Redwing Tayac, an outspoken leader in the movement for Indigenous and Human Rights, and the son of the late Chief Turkey Tayac, a prominent figure in the Native American revitalization and reclamation movements of the last half of the twentieth century.
History
Anthropologists and historians contend that the ancestors of the Piscataway came to the Potomac River region roughly ten thousand years ago, and coalesced into a nation comprised of numerous settlements sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. After excavating ancient sites in the traditional homeland of the Piscataway, archaeologists generally posit that sometime around 800 C.E., peoples living along the Potomac had begun to experiment with maize as a supplement to their ordinary hunting-gathering diet of fish, game, and wild plants.
The Indigenous Chesapeake
Other 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 sixteenth century, the Piscataway were a distinct polity with a distinct society and culture who lived year-round in permanent villages.
In fact, by 1500, the Piscataway and their Algonquian neighbors had become so numerous that they gradually supplemented their hunting-gathering subsistance economy with increasingly sophisticated agricultural forms of production. Cultivating vast fields of calorie-rich maize, squash, and beans -- the production and distribution of which was controlled and facilitated by women -- the Piscataway and other related Algonquian peoples were able to feed their growing communities, even as they continued gathering wild plants from nearby freshwater marshes, and men cleared new fields, hunted, and fished.
The onset of a centuries-long "Little Ice Age" sometime in 1300, had driven Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples from upland and northern communities southward to the warmer climate of the Potomac basin, where growing seasons were still long enough to grow maize. The increasing conflict over territory was enormously destructive; indeed, by 1600, incursions from Iroquoian peoples from the north had almost entirely destroyed many of the settlements above present-day Great Falls, Virginia.
Algonquian villages below the fall line survived by consolidating authority in the hands of hereditary chiefs who exacted tribute, sent men to war, and coordinated the resistance against northern incursions and rival claimants to their homelands. A hierarchy of places and rulers emerged: hamlets without hereditary rulers paid tribute to a nearby village whose chief, or "werowance," appointed a "lesser king" to each dependent settlement. With political change came changes in social structure and religious evolutions that exalted By the end of the sixteenth century, each werowance on the north bank of the Potomac was in turn subject to a single paramount chief: the ruler of the Piscataways, known as the "Tayac."
English Colonization
When English colonials such as Captain John Smith began to visit the Potomac in 1608, rivals and reluctant subjects of the Tayac hoped that the newcomers would alter the balance of power in the region. This strategy worked: the Virginia Company, and later, Virginia Colony, in search of trading partners, consistently allied themselves with Piscataway enemies. By the early 1630s, the Tayac's hold over some of his subordinate werowances had weakened considerably. But when the English began to colonize what is now Maryland, the Tayac managed to turn the newcomers into allies. Granting the English an Indian settlement that the English re-named after their own monarch, St. Mary's City, the Tayac also intended that the new colonial outpost now serve him as a buffer against Susquehannock incursions from the north.
Any benefits to having the English as allies and buffers were short-lived. Maryland Colony was initially too weak to pose a significant threat, but once the English transitioned from establishing a beach-head to developing a colony, they turned against the Piscataway. By 1668 western shore Algonquians were confined to two reservations: one on the Wicomico River, the other, on those settlements that comprised a portion of the Piscataway homeland. Refugees from dispossessed Algonquian nations coalesced with the Piscataway. Colonial authorities even forced the Piscataway to permit the hated Susquehannock, an Iroquoian people, to relocate to their own territory after the defeat of the Susquehannock by the Haudenosaunee. This unhappy compromise only escalated hostilities that eventually culminated in war, so that by 1675, the Susquehannock were expelled from Maryland Colony. The Iroquoian Susquehannock had suffered a devastating defeat, first through a callous act of English treachery, and thereafter, by Piscataway warriors who leapt at the opportunity to attack their traditional enemy.
Making their way northward, the Susquehannock joined forces with the Haudenosaunee, and returned, time, and time again, to attack the Piscataway. Though they were still allies, the English provided little help to the Piscataway. Maryland Colony increasingly sought to wrest control of Piscataway land rather than serve as allies of a sovereign people. By the end of the seventeenth century, some Piscataway families relocated northward, along the Potomac to escape the encroaching English.
The Long Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, some Piscataway families, as well as other fleeing Algonquian groups relocated once again, this time to the Susquehanna River. Known now as the "Conoy," they sought the protection of the powerful Haudenosaunee, but even Pennsylvania Colony proved unsafe. While families of Conoy Indians resumed a northward trajectory, and resettled in New France, others may have moved south toward Virginia Colony, and merged with the Meherrin.
Another core group of Piscataway families, severly reduced in number, and increasingly vulnerable to disease and colonial warfare, refused to migrate north or south, and continued to inhabit what remained of their traditional homeland. Though destroyed as an independent, sovereign polity, the Piscataway survived, and reorganized themselves into village settlements.
Although a few families identified themselves as Piscataway Indians by the early twentieth century, prevailing racialist attitudes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Jim Crow policies of the twentieth century determined ethnic and cultural identification in post-American Revolution Maryland. With the enforcement of the "one-drop rule," anyone with a discernable amount of African ancestry would be classified as "negro," "mulatto," or "black," thereby discounting any other ancestry. Moreover, with the nullification of Native American identity through census enumeration and state legislation, any standing Native American treaty rights were that much easier to abrogate. Thus, when Native American reservations were dissolved by the colonial government of Maryland in the eighteenth century, and when the Piscataway were reclassified as "free negro" or "mulatto" on state and federal census records in the nineteenth century, a process of detribalization was set into motion the implications of which were carried well into the twentieth century. Contradictorily, while the Piscataway were enumerated as "mulattos" in state and federal census records, Catholic parish records and ethnographic reports continued to identify the Piscataway as Indians.
Piscataway Revival
Chief Turkey Tayac was a critically important figure in the early and mid-twentieth century cultural revitalization movements not only among the Piscataway, but also among remnant Southeastern Native American communities, including the Lumbee, Nanticoke, and Powhatan Indians of the Atlantic coastal plain. Almost one century ago, and with only a third grade education, the innovative, self-deterministic leadership-style of Chief Turkey Tayac began the process of cultural revitalization and self-determination that continues to mark contemporary efforts of Piscataway Indians. Assuming the traditional leadership title, "tayac" during an era when Native Americans were increasingly being regulated by blood quantum outlined in the Indian Reorganization Act, Chief Turkey Tayac organized a movement for Native American peoples that privileged self-ascriptive forms of identification.
Today, the Piscataway Indian Nation is an emergent sovereign indigenous presence in their own Chesapeake homeland. Like Native American peoples all over the United States, the Piscataway Indian tribal nation is enjoying a renaissance.
Sources
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- Goddard, Ives (1978). “Eastern Algonquian Languages.” In Bruce Trigger (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15 (Northeast). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, pp. 70-77.
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- Hertzberg, Hazel. The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan Indian Movements. NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971.
- Merrell, James H. "Cultural Continuity Among the Piscataway Indians of Colonial Maryland." William & Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 36 (1979): 548-70.
- Potter, Stephen R. Commoners, Tribute, and Chiefs: The Development of Algonquian Culture in the Potomac Valley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
- Tayac, Gabrielle. "National Museum of the American Indian ? 'We Rise, We Fall, We Rise' ? a Piscataway Descendant Bears Witness at a Capital Groundbreaking." Smithsonian 35, no. 6 (2004): 63-66.