First Peoples of the Creek

This month, the Stafford County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted not to renew a lease agreement with the local Patawomeck Indian tribe. At issue is a 6.5 acre piece of waterfront, County-owned land which has been leased to the tribe for the last decade. The tribe has since used the land, overlooking Aquia Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River, to construct a medicine wheel and conduct various tribal activities. As reported in the press, the core issue behind the supervisors' decision was the tribe's legitimacy. Members of the board note the state-recognized tribe had failed to provide supporting documents proving its existence. In addition, two amateur local historians have long been arguing that the tribe is "actually just a collection of White people incorrectly claiming indigenous heritage."   

Snake art by tribal member (author)

Like everything else, there's a backstory to this bit of local news.  

But from the start, it's important to understand two things. 

First, no one on the board -- or anyone else associated with the board's decision -- has any qualifications whatsoever to decide who is or who isn't a tribe. Second, four-plus centuries after first contact with Europeans, there are no "Hollywood" Indians living in Stafford County, or Virginia, for that matter. Don't go looking for bronze people dressed in buckskin, riding horses and carrying spears. This is a dynamic place where people have intermarried, switched names, moved around, and where -- crucially -- political authorities have long favored certain identities and worked to eliminate others. 

But there are Indians here.  

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English Captain John Smith, of Jamestown fame, named the river and creek after the Patawomeck tribe in 1608.

Patawomeck dugout canoe (author)

Today, the tribal community is centered around a small community in the White Oak area of Stafford County, on the south bank of Potomac Creek. The creek here is half a mile wide. Its confluence with the larger Potomac River lies about a mile away. Historically, and to an extent still, this riverine landscape is best “understood and labeled from the vantage point of a canoe.”[1] This is a place of overlapping geographies. Correspondingly, the tribe’s traditional identity is one of traders and intermediaries. In the Indigenous Algonquin language common to eastern North America, “Patawomeck” means “to bring again they go and come.”[2] 

This relatively small spot contains a lot of local and national history, too. The Patawomecks were the most numerous tribe residing along the river when Europeans arrived.[3] Pocohantas is believed to have married a Patawomeck, and to have been abducted from Potomac Creek before marrying Englishman John Rolfe and traveling to London. The tribe also played a unique intermediary role between English colonists and Native peoples farther to the north and west. Stafford County’s first courthouses – created in the 1660s and "the primary symbol[s] of English power” – were built practically atop Patawomeck villages as the English communicated control of the land.[4]

Yet, despite changes and even diaspora, tribal descendants persisted in the area. Patawomeck watermen were evident into living memory. They fished, crabbed, and wove eel pots. They aligned tall sticks in Potomac creek to construct carp pens. The carp they caught – an invasive species introduced in the 1800s – don't appear to have been consumed locally, supplying instead the Jewish gefilte fish industry in New York. These were not “pure” Indians isolated from global forces.[5]  

Patawomeck eel pots (author)

The Patawomecks are therefore resilient people. Yet like many species of the creek, they also know what it’s like to be on the brink of extinction. Or at least the official version of it.   

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When anthropologist Frank Speck visited Stafford County in the early 1920s, he identified 150-plus people that “may be the residue of the Indians who are recorded to have inhabited Potomac Creek.” Most of “the Potomac Band” were living in the rural White Oak area then, too.[6] Speck recorded fishing as their chief occupation, and even a humorous folktale about blood ties to Sir Isaac Newton (Newton still is a common tribal surname).   

But it wasn’t easy to be Indian at the time of Speck’s visit. To many, “The Roaring Twenties” means the Jazz Age and flappers getting the vote. But 1920s Virginia was in the destructive thrall of “scientific racism,” white superiority, and eugenics – belief in racial improvement through selective breeding and social exclusion. In 1924, Virginia’s General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act to stop interracial marriages. The Act was the brainchild of Walter Plecker, the registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics and a man obsessed with racial purity. Plecker was later to boast that his work to preserve purity of race was more complete than that of the German Nazi Party.  

The Racial Integrity Act introduced certificates of “racial composition” for Virginia residents over the age of fourteen. A 1930 revision required marriage applicants to identify their race as either “white” or “colored. “Colored” meant of Indian or Black descent. (Elite White Virginians fetishized ties to Pocahontas, so an exception was made for persons of one-sixteenth or less American Indian blood.)[7]

Plecker sought to erase Indigenous peoples from the state records by lumping them with “colored” residents. So, a century ago anyone identifying as Indian faced a choice: either sign up as “white,” or sign up as “colored.”

Patawomeck baskets (author)

The consequences were clear in segregated Virginia. “Colored” folks went to inferior schools and faced lives of profound racial discrimination. A current Patawomeck tribal member related to me how the chief of a different Virginia tribe opined he’d “rather be dead than black.”  

In this way, most Patawomecks who knew of or suspected native ancestry became officially White. Tribal identity nearly vanished for two or more generations as the records went silent on the tribe’s existence (Plecker's law wasn't overturned until 1967). This official silence complicates the tribe’s current attempt to gain federal recognition, since an unbroken paper trail establishing continuous existence is a major path to such recognition. 

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However, despite discrimination, racial prejudice, and official attempts at extinction, people of Patawomeck descent continued to maintain their identity. Members of the tight-knit community -- most of whom still live in the same area centuries after "first contact" -- passed down genealogies, traditions, stories, craft making (almost always water-related), and more. When the law and society saw Indian identity as something to be ashamed of, why would they do this if it was merely bunk?

Professional anthropologists (who study peoples for a living), historians, and even legal experts increasingly recognize that oral traditions may serve as strong evidence of history and identity, especially where Indigeneous peoples are concerned. While this may prove hard for some authorities to accept, there is increasing evidence that oral traditions "can be as reliable as written documents for reconstructing the past." It's unlikely that any of the board of supervisors, busy as they are with inadequate roads, schools, and data centers are aware of this.

But I suspect there's another element to this move against the tribe.

Modern art by tribal member (author)

In recent conversations, a tribal member told me that the Patawomeck are reluctant to share their archives with the County not just because the County has no one qualified to understand them and plays no role in the federal tribal recognition process, but also because the County seems determined to question their recognition. My interlocutor seemed to suggest that nothing good would come from showing the County what papers they have.

This distrust immediately reminded me of responses I received, several years ago, when I researched Stafford County private landowners' attitudes towards land conservation. A number of landowners desired to save their land from development when they're gone. But they often expressed a lack of trust in the elected board of supervisors. Noting that the board's policies may change overnight as a result of an election (an obvious truth), many preferred to find another agency to work with because, as one told me, "I just believe that whether [the County] would live up to it [a permanent conservation agreement] is questionable." 

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The story of the Patawomecks underlines how Virginians have long understood that being “of” the soil is a fundamentally moral issue, wrapped in reason and emotion. It is a story of inclusion and exclusion. To stay connected to their homeland, tribal members have had to adapt, transform, and transfigure their lives.

Today, over two thousand declared tribal citizens live within ten miles or so of White Oak, on the banks of Potomac Creek. They are there not because the law recognizes them, or because it refuses to do so. The law has never been so worthy of their trust.

They're there today because -- like their previous generations -- they know who they are.

Patawomeck symbol (author)

Notes:

All Patawomeck tribal art pictured here was exhibited at the University of Mary Washington's Ridderhof Martin Gallery in 2025. 

1. Martin D. Gallivan, The Powhatan Landscape: An Archeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake. (University of Florida Press: 2016), 21.

2. D. Brad Hatch and Jason R. Sellers, "Interpreting Indigenous Geography, Interaction, and Movement in the Upper Northern Neck: The Patawomecks in the 17th Century," Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine LXIII (December 2023), 9662.

3. James D. Rice, Nature & History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers tot he Age of Jefferson. (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2009), 53.

4. Hatch and Sellers, 9683.

5. Information from ibid., 9664-9684, and author interview with Patawomeck tribal historian Dr. Brad Hatch. 

6. See Helen C. Roundtree, Pocahontas' People, 216; Frank G. Speck, "Chapters in the Ethnology of the Powhatan Tribes of Virginia." Indian Notes and Monographs Vol. No. 5 (New York: Museum of the American Indian, 1928), 282-284.

7. See "Virginia Health Bulletin: The New Law to Preserve Racial Integrity, March 1924":  https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/dbva/items/show/226.