Join Historic Germanna in honoring Native American Heritage Month this November with a special Lunch & Learn Lecture with guest speaker Victoria Ferguson.
Ferguson will highlight the emergence of Eastern Woodland women of Virginia’s interior as the dominate force and foundation of their tribal groups. Her research has found that the matrilineal culture developed around the family ties of the female’s blood line, and that the female’s line was used to trace clans back to their beginning. Clans carried such names as deer, bear, wolf, and turtle. Women’s roles extended to cover matters such as who would be responsible for a particular job, who could and could not marry, who someone was buried with, which town they lived in, and who would be chief of a village or town. Women managed a great deal of work which served as a driving force within communities until European colonization destroyed their tribal structure and their functioning societies.
Made possible in part by a Virginia Humanities grant, the event will be presented both via virtual link and in person at the Hitt Archaeology Center located on the grounds of the Historic Germanna Visitor Center. Registration is required.
Victoria Ferguson is an enrolled citizen of the Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia and is a graduate of Marshall University. Victoria has a background in researching science methodologies to support historical information. She has spent 30 years seeking first-person documentation and archaeological information to help explain and support theories on the daily living habits of the Eastern Siouan populations up through the early European colonization period. She has written and presented work at Virginia Tech, Washington and Lee, Sweet Briar College, James Madison University, Mary Baldwin, and a number of archaeological conferences. She has also been featured in two PBS documentaries: Virginia Indians: Reclaiming our Heritage and Pocahontas Revealed. She currently serves as the Program Director for Historic Solitude/Fraction Site on the campus of Virginia Tech.
The Monacan Indian Nation is a federally recognized sovereign tribe, headquartered on Bear Mountain in Amherst County. Citizens of the Nation are descended from Virginia and North Carolina Eastern Siouan cultural and linguistic groups, and our ancestral territory includes Virginia west of the fall line of the rivers, sections of southeastern West Virginia, and portions of northern North Carolina.
