WE-SORTS Chesapeake Bay region, 600 years ago, before the European colonization, land was fertile, people

were hardworking, they sowed beans, maze, the harvest used to be good, invented granaries, mastered pottery, spent the rest of the time fishing and hunting. They were living in the area for hundreds of years together. Seizing the land away from the native inhabitants is a horrifying mistake. But do we recognize it as a crime? Today the region is known as Maryland in USA, some fifty miles away from Washington DC. Many different Indian tribes lived in the Chesapeake region, and their social, cultural, and political identities were extremely varied and complex. They spoke different languages, had distinct cultures, and organized themselves in a range of political structures. Somewhere in the mid 16 century Spanish came to Chesapeake in search of gold. They found none, but they captured young Powhatan boys. Otherwise friendly and loving, the natives, disgruntled over the issue, became skeptical of any future contact with Europeans. After 45 years the English came, in 1607. What they had feared since the first foreign occupation eventually proved to be right. The English also came in search of gold and set up James Town, a colony funded by Virginia Company. Hostile climate and soil of North America proved to be too much for them and many died of starvation. They couldnt manage farming in the unfamiliar territory. Totally failed to survive by themselves. The Powhatan people, the natives, proved to be a very good host and fed them and kept them alive. Very soon than later the Europeans managed to get the permission to live in a small piece of land within the Powhatan territory. The English soon, started to claim permanent possession of the land. This irked the natives. Much to their bewilderment, whenever they left their villages for hunting and fishing they returned to find that their land was occupied by the colonists. Such incidents became regular and the Europeans grew more belligerent, they raided, plundered and scorched native villages for food, and mercilessly killed children and women. Resent and anger readily slipped to deadly wars between the two which lasted throughout the 17th century. The fertile, peaceful Chesapeake Bay became a cauldron of wars. The natives Powhatan, Nanticoke, and Piscataway fared badly in the war and their population dwindled considerably. The colonizers also brought deadly deceases - smallpox, cholera, and measles with them. The natives died like flies in contact with fire, because against the foreign illnesses they were totally helpless, had no immunity to fight back. The decease spread from person to person, from villages to villages and so on. Even before the contact of the Europeans the population of several villages was decimated. Wars, loss of land, social upheaval, and disease combined to devastate native communities. Population losses weakened Native culture. Oral tradition was critical for preserving cultural knowledge; when elders died, it was like having entire libraries burned down. As more and more English colonists flooded into the Chesapeake region, Native peoples lost more of their lands. These encroachments by the colonists led to violence, which the English attempted to quell by establishing treaties with native peoples. The natives, the Powhatan, Piscataway, and Nanticoke agreed to submit to English control in exchange for peace. The

English promised Native peoples rights to hunt in their territories and to fair treatment under the law. The treaties also set aside smaller holdings of original native territories for the natives so that they could live undisturbed by settlers. After a short while the treatise followed its predictable fate of being misinterpreted and violated against the natives, as it is likely in any treaty between a strong encroacher and weakening natives. By 1700s, Piscataway, Nanticoke, and Powhatan treaty rights were largely ignored. The pressures on Chesapeake Native peoples mounted as the populations of the colonies and later the United States grew. Some tribes immigrated to other areas where they could live more peacefully. The Nanticoke and the Piscataway central chiefs and their councils convinced most of their people to move to Pennsylvania by the early 1700s. They were forced to fish in less bountiful creeks, rather than at prime spots they had always occupied on the rivers. They no longer owned large plots of land to plant and harvest crops. Despite losing their lands, many tribes continued to live within the old boundaries of their original reservations, and still do today. Sometimes tribal members chose to assimilate in order to escape the shame inflicted by the larger society, which stereotyped Indian people as ignorant or backwards. Education and religious conversion were widely used by the colonists to assimilate the natives. The native children were forced to learn English in schools, during the course, erasing Native languages and culture from most tribal members lives. Native people were not that receptive towards conversion at first, but later they gave in.

Getting a basic education was difficult and college education was a virtual impossibility for Native Americans during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first half of the twentieth century, Native Americans were barred from attending white public schools in the Columbia. Native children in southern Maryland were not allowed to attend white schools, but were allowed to attend black schools. Less educated Native Chesapeake people often had to work as low-paid laborers, and many lived in poverty. Meanwhile, the United States economy transformed to an industrial one from the earlier agrarian one, at the beginning of the twentieth century, more and more economic activities became city centric. The natives were forced to take jobs in the cities and it made it more difficult for families to sustain their Native culture and for tribal communities to stay together. But in the Chesapeake region, the Powhatan, Nanticoke, and Piscataway peoples have established new structures of governance and new avenues for cultural expression within their communities. Today, chiefs in most cases are still the main leaders of Chesapeake regional tribes. They also maintain oral traditions, or stories and other teachings that instruct their children about unique Native ways of relating to the natural world. Native American tribes existed as nations long before the arrival of European colonists. However, in 2006, many of the Nanticoke, Piscataway, and Powhatan communities still seek official government recognition as tribes from the state and federal governments. Currently, no tribes from the region are recognized by the United States. Native American communities desire these forms of legal recognition so that their long-standing status as nations will be

acknowledged and further respected. They also want to exercise the rights and privileges granted to recognized tribes.