Exploring: Virginia Indians

Languages and Interpreters in Early Virginia Indian Society

Encyclopedia Virginia

Early Virginia Indians spoke in dialects of three different language families; by the twentieth century, most if not all Virginia Indian languages had become extinct. Learn more about these languages, and the attempts to record and reconstruct them, in this entry by section editor Helen C. Rountree.

RACE – Are We So Different?

Grants

Funded in part by a grant from VFH, the exhibit RACE: Are We So Different examines the topic of race from scientific, historical and cultural perspectives.

Cooking in Early Virginia Indian Society

Fictiliuvaforu in quibus cibucoquunt (The Beauty of the Earthenware Vessels in Which They Cook Food)

Early Virginia Indians hunted, fished, and collected wild grains and berries, which they prepared in various ways. Meats were roasted, while grains and tubers were pounded into ashcakes and then baked.

Pocahontas

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, paramount chief of an alliance of Virginia Indians in Tidewater Virginia.

Early Virginia Indian Education

Vt Matronae Dafamonquepeuc liberos geftant (How the Married Women of Dasamonquepeuc Carry Their Children)

Early Virginia Indian 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.

Encounter

Originally aired as five separate features, this series radio reports explores the lives of Virginia Indians today.

How! and Other Approaches to American Indians

American Indian historians and authors Gabrielle Tayac (Meet Naiche) and Karenne Wood (Markings on Earth) discuss ways in which American Indians have been marginalized through history, through the construction of their histories by non-Native scholars, and through the perpetuation of stereotypes in Hollywood, museums, and among the general public. This discussion was part of VFH’s [...]

The “Discovery” of North America

When the British planted a cross and their flag on territory previously unclaimed by European nations, they were, Chief Justice John Marshall would later say, exercising a right of discovery that extended back to the 15th-century colonization by Spain and Portugal of non-Christian lands. Historian Robert J. Miller and Karenne Wood (Virginia Foundation for the [...]