A Casualty of Historicity: A Virginia Tribe Reclaims Its Past
From an article by Gregory S. Schneider in the Washington Post from November 21, 2018, an extracted observation can be readily applied in the mid-Kwenitekw valley as well, to Sokwakik and the presence of the Abenaki here:
”Popular understanding of Virginia’s native people comes from early English accounts, and Jamestown settlers were all about Powhatan, Pocahontas and the Indians along the James and York rivers.
“Powhatan looms way larger than life in some respects because the English are there, and they’re writing about him,” King said. “And this evidence is really suggesting that he probably was just a chief like all of the chiefs were in the area.”
The native people on the Rappahannock lived just beyond the range of the first colonists and kept themselves separate. While the nearby Pamunkey Tribe carved out a reservation in the late 1600s, the Rappahannock lost their ancestral land and scattered.
Understanding of the indigenous relationships on the northwestern frontier of Massachusetts Bay colony and its successors is clouded by the extreme limitations of contemporary English awareness and documentation. North of the today’s shared tri-state border where Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts meet, the Land and its People were a near-unknown. Added into that equation was the European empire-building reality that all of those indigenous people, Abenaki of various family bands, were allied with New France. With the Kwenitekw/Connecticut River being the primary path of north-south travel, there was a blockage point (of familiarity/knowledge/exchange) above Pocumtuk/Deerfield, that ebbed and flowed around Squakheag/Northfield, and eventually Fort Dummer/Brattleboro. With the inability to penetrate effectively beyond this point for decades, due to Native resistance, the English colonial record of this northward region is scant or lacking. The French-allied [Western] Abenaki fought a series of wars that lasted nearly a century, and never surrendered.
This dearth of information has carried through, in great part, with subsequent historians and today’s continuingassociations relative to the relationships of the various indigenous groups in the Valley and beyond. With Pocumtuk/Deerfield being the last, best frame of reference in the British record, they are often given outsize impact in the area, with Squakheag (Sokwakik) being lumped in with them (by the colonists), and even the Pennacook Abenaki (better known to the east due to proximity to Boston and other population centers) assigned purview in the area. While all of these entities had strong relationships with the Sokwakiak/Sokoki, they held their own sovereignty, with even stronger ties to the north and northeast as well.
Just as with the Rappahannock and Powhatan, the skewed colonial perspective has carried through to this day, and the stories from the Land that can fill in the gaps are just being put back in place.