Three Painted Gourds: Pamunkey Artist Ethan Brown on Powhatan Life and Survival

Ethan Brown is a citizen of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe, a federally recognised tribe whose reservation in Virginia is one of the two oldest in the United States. He makes contemporary art in many forms — gourd art, wood sculpture, oil painting, pottery and film. In this National Park Service feature he explains three of his painted gourds, each telling a different part of the Powhatan story. What follows paraphrases his account.

Gourd one: Powhatan life around 1600

The first gourd shows Powhatan culture around the time the first European ships came up the river.

Appearance. One man in the foreground wears the men's style: hair long on the left, cropped in the middle, and shaved or plucked on the right. Some writers guess this kept the bowstring from catching, but Brown notes it also had a spiritual side — the style copied one of the Powhatan idols. The man holds a war club and is painted with a red dye made from bloodroot; red, black and white were the most important colours, and women tattooed designs and animals on their skin. The second man, holding a bow, wears "Powhatan's mantle", an artifact that survives from the 1600s — four deerskins sewn together, with white shell beads forming circles and figures of a man and animals. Whether it truly belonged to Powhatan, or was ever worn, is uncertain.

Society. Men and women had separate roles, broadly: men hunted, fished and fought; women farmed, built the houses and cooked. Farming — above all the "three sisters", corn, squash and beans — mattered but was not the base of society. Some settlements were lasting, but villages often moved with the seasons, following ripening plants and the animals. A werowance, or chief, led each village, and when the English arrived every tribe in the region owed allegiance to Powhatan, the Mamanatowick or paramount chief. Power passed through the mother's line.

Home. Families lived in longhouses of bent saplings covered with bark or reed mats. Outside, a deerskin is stretched for working — most clothing came from skins and furs. Women made pottery from river clay for storing and cooking; on the gourd a woman sorts acorns by the fire while a stew cooks and fish are smoked. Rivers were the culture's lifeline, for food and for travel: dugout canoes were made by felling trees and burning out their centres, and men fished with spears, traps and nets across the water.

Ceremony. In the middle stands a carved post that warned off evil spirits, set up in the dance circle. At the top, in the distance, is a huskanaw pen. A boy of high rank coming of age was ritually taken from the tribe, lived apart for months and went through a harsh ceremony led by priests, at one point kept in the pen while drugged — perhaps with jimsonweed. He was to come back reborn, having forgotten his childhood and family, to take a wife and serve the chief rather than his parents.

Lower down, a child on a raised platform guards a cornfield from animals. A priest tends a fire before a temple — placed in the scene for the artwork, since temples stood away from villages. Only priests and chiefs could enter. Inside lay past chiefs' bodies: the skin removed, the body defleshed and dried, the skeleton returned to the dried skin, the joints packed with sand and the body cavity with pearls, shell beads and copper.

Gourd two: a creation story

Evenings round the fire made storytelling central to Powhatan life. With no written language, stories shifted as they passed from teller to teller, so this one has many versions. In Brown's telling:

The greatest of the spirits sometimes took the shape of a Great Hare. He came from the land of the rising sun carrying a magic bag with Man and Woman inside. He made the mountains, rivers and forests, and set a great deer on the land. Four old female spirits, jealous of the Hare and his creation, waited until he was away, turned themselves into giants, killed the deer with long hunting poles and ate it. The Great Hare then called the winds of the four directions to scatter the deer's hairs across the land, and each hair became a smaller deer. Finally he took Man and Woman from his bag and set them in the land to live in harmony, with food to live on.

Gourd three: the Pamunkey Reservation around 1900

Brown says the four centuries since the 1600s would fill books. The Pamunkey Reservation was set up by treaties in 1646 and 1677; it has shrunk greatly, but the tribe still lives on land that has never been taken from it. The same treaties set an annual tribute to the Governor of Virginia that continues today: every Thanksgiving the tribe brings a deer to the Governor's mansion — the deer in the sky of this gourd.

By the early 1900s the community had been forced to adapt to survive and keep its identity, and there have been repeated attempts to claim that no Indians remain in Virginia — so, as Brown puts it, theirs is a story of survival. The reservation was a small country community. The river still gave food and work: men fished for shad, trapped, or guided hunting parties. Two men return from fishing, in suits and work clothes like anyone else; on the left, holding the catch, is George Major Cook, chief for many years in that period.

By the railway is a deadfall trap for small game. Rowboats had replaced canoes, but nets were still stretched across the river to fish the tides. The sun sets over a place called the pocket, where oral tradition says Powhatan's bones were moved and buried; a duck blind sits on the horizon, and nets hang on a post to be straightened. Nearby is the Pamunkey Baptist Church, then the heart of the community.

At the bottom, Theodora, George Major Cook's wife, holds a pot — pottery stayed a women's tradition. She wears deerskin regalia, by then kept for special occasions. A pottery school was built on the reservation in 1932 so women could sell their work during the Great Depression.

Life was hard and self-sufficient: big gardens, preserved food, chickens, pigs, cows and a horse, horse-and-buggy travel on dirt roads. In the background is the old schoolhouse. Pamunkey children were barred from public school, and those who studied beyond the local grade school were sent to Indian schools in the West or elsewhere.

Brown adds that anyone in Virginia — on the shore, or planting a tree at home — might turn up a pottery shard from a culture thousands of years old.

What the gourds are, and are not

Brown stresses that the gourds give an impression, from his own experience as a reservation resident descended from these people. Much traditional culture has been lost, though many traditions remain, and even every history book and every descendant together would give a skewed picture — as for any culture. The English who recorded Powhatan life were often frustrated by differing accounts from different people, perhaps because of the lack of writing, perhaps for deeper reasons.

The Powhatan were a woodland people who lived in tidewater Virginia for more than 10,000 years, their food, materials and methods all drawn from and bound up with nature — an old-growth forest along the whole East Coast, with huge trees and far richer rivers, since cut down. Living so close to nature made them largely sustainable, but managing resources was still a problem. Brown rejects the picture of American Indians as nature saints who wasted nothing: whatever they conserved was out of necessity, and they were as opportunistic as any other people.

Sources

• National Park Service, Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, "Gourd Art." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/gourd-art.htm
• More: Indigenous Artistry: Ethan Brown, an NPS interview with the artist.
• The photo of the unpainted gourds is from the NPS article. The article's photographs of the painted gourds are left out: the photos are the Park Service's, but the paintings on them are the artist's own work.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.