WASHINGTON DC's ONLY REAL ROYALS?

ROYALTY and IMPEACHMENT

By Michael Auld 

powhatanmuseum.com  

 During Donald Trumps impeachment his critics said that he wanted to be a king. However, this pedigree is usually decreed by birth. True American Royalty lay elsewhere. 

If the 17th Century English were right, the most widely known royal Washingtonian was our Princess Matoaka a.k.a. Pocahontas. 

The territory that came under her father’s governance included a major portion of our contemporary District of Columbia. And, Capitol Hill was his “favorite place to caucus.”. 

(See DC map below).

A print titled, “Pocahontas Unmasked” by Rose Powhatan (Pamunkey/Tauxenent) one of  her distant maternal cousins. This is a rendering of the DC artist's reinterpretation of an image of Pocahontas as a tattooed Native American young woman of color, (from John White's 1585 watercolors based on the Amerindian phenotype) of indigenous Virginian women. The print challenges an English artist's (Simon de Passe) interpretation of her as an acceptable, "proper" white English princess of the times.

In life and in death she was, and is still America's most venerated princess. Accepted at Court by British royalty as "Potentiss Prince Powhatani Imp Virginiae", her second husband (via a bigamous marriage), the commoner John Rolfe, in 1616, was scolded by the Queen Anne of Denmark, (James of England's wife) for having the audacity to marry royalty.

To underscore her pedigree, she was first portrayed by the English as a royal person. Then, in the US Capitol's Rotunda...

Above: Giant 12'x18' painting by John Gadsby Chapman (1839) of the Baptism of Pocahontas, daughter of "the influential Algonkian chief Powhatan." Here she is depicted as a woman of color. It is located in DC's Capitol Rotunda. "The Heart of America."

Pocahontas is almost deified in many ways in contemporary American culture. Examples are Disney's Pocahontas, later in Terrence Malick's The New World epic, in numerous publications, and documentaries.

The New World movie was shot next to the Chickahominy nation’s River in Charles  City, Virginia near Richmond. Many of the extras were from the historic Powhatan Confederacy. Rose Powhatan (Pamunkey/Tauxenent) portrayed a clan mother while her youngest son, Kiros played a Zone One Warrior. He is in the opening scene as the warrior pointing at Captain John Smith’s arriving ship.

 

POCAHONTAS'  TRIBE

Seal of the Pamunkey (“Place of the Sweat”). This was the location of an Algonquian temple center and the home village of Pocahontas. Another Pamunkey village site was also located in both the District of Columbia and *"Pomunkey," Maryland'

Pocahontas, like her famous father, the werowance (leader) Wahunsenacawh, the second Dreamer (or “Powhatan”) were Pamunkey, a leading part of Native America’s only encountered 32-34 member empire under the governance of one man. Their nation is located in King William County, Virginia and there are currently numerous surviving descendants. This is the oldest reservation in North America. The reservation was established in 1658 after the last Powhatan Wars of attempted foreign expulsion. One could call the Powhatan conflicts with the English, the first "Wars of Homeland Security."



However, after the American Revolution, this First Daughter was relegated to just an idealized ancestor of many European Americans.

Pocahontas is so popular that today there are many Americans who claim descent from her. Those of note are called The First Families of Virginia." This presumptuous designation that typically in America, disqualifies millions of Native Americans whose first Inhabitants have still been here for millennia.   

“People who claim to be descendants of Pocahontas can be found in every state and number about 100,000. Distinguished genealogists have conducted searches in the few remaining records in several "burned" counties, which provide some proofs of Bolling family ties to Powhatan.” [President Taft’s wife Ann Bolling, of Bolling Air Force Base in Maryland, claimed descent from Pocahontas]  

 "POCAHONTAS IS A POPULAR GRANDMOTHER TO CLAIM”-Virginia Rollins, April 1, 2006. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailypress.com/news/dp-xpm-20060401-2006-04-01-0604010024-story,amp.html

WHO'S YOUR DADDY?

And why does he need recognition?

Oil painting: "The Crowning of Powhatan". by John Gadsby Chapman. In the painting, Pocahontas and her mother sit just behind Powhatan.

Powhatan II or Wahunsenacawh was responsible for allowing the first successful English settlement to exist in North America. Yet, its successor, the United States of America has no DC monument to him. Powhatan II has, therefore, become the most disrespected leader in American history.


Although our current president treats his office like a potentate, he was not the first to toy with the concept of imposing royalty. Also, George Washington was not the first American to be offered kingship. America's first territorial "Washingtonian" king was Pocahontas' daddy.

As seen in the above painting, crowned a king by the English, Powhatan II, Princess Pocahontas’ father, governed over an extensive Native American territory that was demoted to a “Chiefdom” or a “Confederacy”. Yet its most famous daughter’s title as a princess was never dropped.

So, the more popularly known DC Indians are fake. Native Americans call them Wana-bees. They derogatorily call themselves the Redskins, considered  "offensive terms for Native Americans." (WorldNet Dictionary).   

Why is she a Washingtonian? 

Washington, DC, especially Capitol Hill, is located within the boundary of the Powhatan Confederacy whose political capital was Werowocomoco (that comes from the Powhatan weroance, meaning "leader" in English; and komakah-comoco), a "settlement"  located near the north bank of the York River in what is now Gloucester County, Virginia. Since this was "where America began", this location could be said to be America's first capital. To say that America's first capital was a European settlement on indigenous land in Philadelphia, PA, is to totally disrespect current sentiment and ceremonies of Indigenous Land Acknowledgements.

The following below is the genesis of the city that we now call Washington DC. Wahunsennachaw or Powhatan II was momentous, or paramount chief, of Tsenacomoco. This territory was an area larger than ten current American **states, that extended through war and diplomacy, into within Washington, DC proper. It is during these decades-old diplomatic sessions that Powhatan II's caucuses (Powhatan Algonquian for "councilor) met on Capitol Hill by the Tiber or Goose Creek (now under Constitution Avenue).

The following are different incarnations of Washington, DC: 

Powhatan Territorial Map http://www.powhatanmuseum.com/Powhatan_Map.html

1. Both the original Federal City’s boundary stones in Virginia and Washington DC and the current border were carved out of the Algonquian territory whose first recorded area was named Tsenacomoco a.k.a. Attan Akamik (“Our Fertile Country”).
2. The northern portion of Powhatan's territorial Kingdom/Confederacy/Chiefdom (Date of territorial acquisition by Wahunsenachaw unknown).
3. Named in 1607, the Virginia Territory by the arriving representatives of the Virginia Company of London.
4. The American Colony.
5. The States of Virginia and Maryland.
6. The Federal City.
7. Washington City.
8. The current District of Columbia. It stands to reason that all of the above original territories within which today’s Washington D.C. now sits owes allegiance to the indigenous Powhatan Confederacy and its descended tribal governments and their survivors. Many of these Indigenous descendants have continued to live, work and be educated in Washington, DC. Their leaders under Cockacoeske signed the final 1677 Treaty of Middle Plantation on their behalf.

NOTES:

*Pomonkey: n,17th Century English interpretation. Maryland name for the Pamunkey (Pá-mung-key) tribe of Native Americans that lived in the MD/DC Metropolitan Area. This second recorded Pamunkey location meant that this was an extension of their main town of the leading tribe in the Powhatan Confederacy and qualifies as their original territory of Attan Akamik ("Our Fertile Country"). At the time of English contact in Jamestown, Powhatan II, then in his 60s, was expanding his territory northwards. This was the second Pamunkey settlement located in Charles County in Southern Maryland (and South Washington, DC) that later became a part of the federal city of Washington City, with its first mayor, Robert Brent   

English chronicler, William Strachey of the Virginia Company wrote that Powhatan II had over 100 wives, many of whom, and their first child, were treated as political alliances of nations within his empire. (E.g. Taux [Little] Powhatan of the Tauxenen is possibly an example of this Algonquian alliance). Princess Pocahontas was one of these offsprings who came from today's Pamunkey Reservation.

The Brent family owned much of the land from before the American Revolutionary War, asserting their claims after Giles Brent married princess Mary Kittamaquund in the 17th century. The jury is still out as to whether Mary and her father, Kitttamukuund were Pomonkey/Pamunkey or Piscataway as other writers claim. The current Charles County in Southern Maryland where Pomonkey is located was claimed, as seen above, via the Brent family’s marriage to 11-year-old Mary. Additionally, the John Smith map of 1608 confirmed that this was the location of the Pamunkey people who were the leading members of the powerful Powhatan Confederacy.  ("Mary" was similar to the baptized Christian name, "Rebecca," given to Pocahontas during her own baptism in Tidewater Virginia). Mary's father Kittamaquund was, like most of the Algonquians near or within the vast Powhatan Territory, were minor "kings" to the early English. They did not have the same clout as Wahunsennachaw whose father, the first Powhatan, had organized the first eight of his son's 32-344 nation empire.   

Robert Brent (1764-1819) became the first mayor of Washington City. (and freed his slaves in his will). The fact that Mary Kittamaquund was a princess married to an Englishman who inherited his large track of land from his wife's people, was in keeping with the English practice in the Virginia Territory of marrying Indian women to inherit Native American property.

** Shown to be larger than the ten contemporary states of Connecticut [5,543.33 sq. mi.], Delaware [2,489.27 sq. mi.], Hawaii [10,930.98 sq. mi.], Maryland [12,406.68 sq. mi.],
Massachusetts [10,554.57 sq. mi.], New Hampshire [9,349.94 sq. mi.], New Jersey [8,721.30] sq. mi.], Rhode
Island [1,545.05 sq. mi.], Vermont [9,614.26 sq. mi.], and the District of Columbia [68.34 sq. mi.]. The information about the size of his territory came from Powhatan himself, corroborated by people within his jurisdiction.