Early Virginia Indians educated their children for the purpose of preparing them to be adults. Boys and girls were expected to absorb the community’s values, including stoicism in the face of hardship, and master the skills necessary to survive and thrive.
For men that included hunting and warfare and for women collecting plants, building houses, and making household furnishings. English colonists had little to say about how Indian girls were reared, either out of lack of interest or because such knowledge was considered to be none of their business.
Powhatan boys were trained in hunting and warfare by their fathers and older male relatives in order to win personal names, learn marksmanship, and earn the right to join the hunt. Between the ages of ten and fifteen, they engaged in the several-months-long huskanaw ritual, in which they were ritually—but not actually—killed and then given a drug which turned them briefly violent and ritually erased their memories of boyhood. The English colonists saw this sort of training for boys as frivolous; they believed that boys, instead of girls, should plant and farm.
Although education practices among the Virginia Indians changed in the years after contact with the English, what remained was an ingrained reluctance to send their children outside the family for instruction.