Nansemond

The Nansemond were an Algonquian-speaking people of the Virginia coastal plain, one of the chiefdoms bound into the Powhatan Confederacy. Their home was the Nansemond River; their name means fishing point, and their villages lived from fishing, oystering and maize fields.

Jamestown's settlers explored the river in 1607, and relations collapsed in 1609, when a colonial raid on Dumpling Island sacked the chief's village and temple. From the 1630s planters encroached on their lands, and in 1638 the chief's daughter Elizabeth married the colonist John Bass; because Nansemond kinship was matrilineal, her children remained Nansemond.

Under this pressure the nation split during the seventeenth century, some families settling among the colonists while others moved south. Descendants kept their identity through the eighteenth century and were registering as Nansemond Indians in Norfolk County by the 1830s.