Helen C. Rountree

Powhatan Indian women: The people captain John Smith barely saw

Most of the eyewitness accounts about Powhatan Indians concern the mens world. This essay attempts to compensate for the imbalance by adding the evidence available from ethnographic analogy from other Woodland Indian cultures, reconstructive ethnobotany in the Chesapeake region, and living history as practiced at the Jamestown Settlement Museums Indian Village. The women emerge as tough, energetic, sociable people who scheduled their work carefully and did much of it independently from the men. The essay describes womens activities on a typical day in early May 1607 in a real village that has been excavated archaeologically at the mouth of the Chickahominy River.