Werowance of the Powhatan

Not the same as Don Luis de Velasco

Notes for Great Chief Powhatan: Chief Powhatan ruled over all the tribes living on the Virginia tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. This is the unknown man who was the Chief of the Powhatans before his son Powhatan. Powhatan's two half-brothers, Opitchapan and Opechancanough succeeded him...

Among his children -

Chief Powhatan (c. June 17, 1547 d c 1618), whose proper name was Wahunsenacawh or (in seventeenth century English spelling) Wahunsunacock, was the leader of the Powhatan (also spelled Powatan and Powhaten), a powerful tribe of Native Americans, speaking an Algonquian language, who lived in Tenakomakah which is now Tidewater Virginia at the time of the first English-Native encounters. Wahunsenacawh was the father of Pocahontas.

Name

Powhatan was originally the name of one of the towns where he lived, a location now in the east end of the city of Richmond, Virginia, as well as the name of the adjacent river (today called the James River). When he created a powerful empire by conquering most of tidewater Virginia, he called himself the Powhatan, often taken as his given name, but actually a title. Another chief village was established at Werowocomoco on the north bank of the York River about 25 miles (40 km) from where "the river divides" at West Point, Virginia, according to Smith.

Origins

Deyo, Bill L CTR NSWCDD, E03A (Tribal Historian of the Patawomeck Indians of Virginia - State Recognized Tribe)
Attachments Aug 4, 2016

Hi Linda,

I am afraid that there is a lot of fabrication of names in the Indian ancestry. There is no evidence that Powhatan had a grandfather named Dashing Stream. Nothing is known about Powhatan's bloodline except that the great Nemattanon/Don Luis de Velasco was probably his maternal uncle. Some records call him Powhatan's father, but that was the Indian Uncle/Father relationship, as Nemattanon was not old enough to have been Powhatan's father. You have to be VERY careful if you are using the Shawnee Heritage books. They are very largely fabricated with a multitude of errors.

References

• Jamestown & The Powhatans ( video )
• http://www.whro.org/jamestown2007/lessonPlans/powhatan.html
• Lots of educational articles http://historyisfun.org/Background-Essays.
• Cultures at Jamestown (PDF)
• Life at Jamestown (PDF)
• Living with the Indians (PDF)
• Tobacco and Labor (PDF)
• Angela (PDF)
• The Angolan Connection and Slavery in Virginia (PDF)
• Company Charters and Challenges (PDF)
• Early Industries in Virginia (PDF);Expansion of Settlement in Early Virginia (PDF)
• The "Great Charter" and the First General Assembly (PDF)
• Henry Spelman (PDF)
• John Smith (PDF)
• Life in England (PDF)
• Pocahontas (PDF)
• Powhatan's Challenge and Opechancanough's Action (PDF)
• The Life of John Smith (PDF)
• Tobacco and Labor (PDF)
• The Virginia Company of London (PDF)
• Women in Early Virginia (PDF)
• Young Pocahontas (PDF)
• Religion at Jamestown (PDF)
• The Story of the Sea Venture
• Pocahontas and the Powhatan Indians of Virginia
• Cultural Intermediaries in Early Virginia
• Powhatan Identity in late 17th-Century Virginia
• Christmas in 17th-century England and Virginia
• Roanoke's Achievement, a lecture about John White and the Roanoke colony delivered by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, a leading early American history scholar, at Jamestown Settlement on July 19, 2008.
• Powhatans Deerskin Mantle with Shell Map, ca. 1608<Pohatan, King of Virginia’s habit all embroidered with shells, or Roanoke As described on p. 47 of the catalog, Museum Tradescantianum (London, 1656). Original artifact (four pieces of tanned buckskin, measuring 2.33 meters long by 1.5 meters wide) preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Lithograph (1888) by P. W. M. Trap publishers, after a black-and-white photograph of the Ashmolean artifact, by E. T. Shelton. Plate XX in Edward B. Tylor, Notes on Powhatans Mantle, Preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Internationales Archive Ethnographie 1 (1888): 215