The Nacotchtank and the Indigenous Land Beneath Washington, D.C.

An archeologist looks for the first residents

Around the turn of the 20th century, Samuel Vincent Proudfit — an archeologist with the Department of the Interior, of Native American ancestry — walked the District of Columbia looking for traces of people who lived there thousands of years before Europeans arrived. He had studied the Mound Builders of the Mississippian culture, and understood, as few did then or do now, that the land of the nation's capital was Indigenous land.

The Nacotchtank

When Captain John Smith came up the Potomac in 1608, he found a thriving cluster of villages between the Great Falls and today's Anacostia River, belonging to the Nacotchtank.

• Who: an unaffiliated group living within the bounds of the greater Conoy/Piscataway Chiefdom.
• The name: Jesuit missionaries later Latinized it to "Anacostan" — said to be easier for Europeans to pronounce.
• Their home: a fur-trading center, rich in raw materials and in crops — the "three sisters," corn, beans and squash.
• First contact: the Nacotchtank welcomed the Europeans warmly, as the Powhatan welcomed the settlers of Jamestown. The early European adventurers would not have survived without Indigenous help.

What contact brought

Over time, contact was devastating:

• the newcomers kept taking more of what was not theirs;
• they exploited conflicts between tribes and made short-term alliances;
• they brought diseases against which the Nacotchtank had no natural immunity.

Where they are now

The Nacotchtank are still here, though they no longer call themselves Nacotchtank.

• In colonial times, most of the historical groups joined the Conoy, together with the Delaware, Iroquois, Mingo and Shawnee.
• Some moved north and east with other groups that left the area entirely.
• More moved away in the 1920s, when Native Americans in Virginia were classed as non-white and made subject to Jim Crow laws.
• The locally recognized Piscataway, Patawomeck and Rappahannock may also descend from these groups.

Today more than 4,000 American Indians live in Washington, D.C.

Sources

Based on "The Indigenous Capital," National Mall and Memorial Parks, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Its photograph of the 1968 Solidarity Day march, from the Washington Star collection of the DC Public Library and unrelated to the text, is not reproduced.