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[[Category:Native American tribes in Maryland]]
[[Category:African-Native American relations]]
[[Category:Algonquian ethnonyms]]
[[de:Conoy]]
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The '''Piscataway Indian Nation''' is a non-state, non-federally recognized [[Native Americans in the United States|Native American]] tribal nation, which, at one time, was one of the most populous and powerful Native polities of the [[Chesapeake Bay]] region. By the early seventeenth century, the Piscataway had come to exercise hegemony over other Native American groups on the north bank of the [[Potomac River]]. While Piscataway fortunes declined as [[Maryland colony]] grew and prospered, the Piscataway continue to be leaders among the tribal nations of [[Maryland]], as well as throughout Indian Country in their commitment to [[Indigenous peoples of the Americas|Indigenous]] and [[Human Rights]].
==Geography==
==Government==
The current chief of the Piscataway Indian Nation is [[Billy Redwing Tayac]], an outspoken leader in the movement for Indigenous and [[Human Rights]], and the son of the late Chief [[Turkey Tayac]], a prominent figure in the [[Native Americans in the United States|Native American]] reclamation and [[revitalization movements]] of the last half of the twentieth century. There are also two other organized tribal groups that have emerged representing Piscataway people including the Piscataway-Conoy Tribe, led by Mrs. Mervin Savoy and the Cedarville Band of Piscataways, led by Natalie Proctor.
==History==
Some archaeologists contend that the ancestors of the Piscataway came to the [[Potomac River]] region roughly ten thousand years ago, and coalesced into a nation comprising numerous settlements sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. After excavating ancient sites in the traditional homeland of the Piscataway, they generally posit that sometime around 800 CE, peoples living along the Potomac had begun to experiment with [[maize]] as a supplement to their ordinary hunting-gathering diet of fish, game, and wild plants.
Some historians have connected the Piscataways' later name of '''Conoy''' with the Kanawha Indians of present-day [[West Virginia]], while other evidence suggests that the Piscataway migrated from the Eastern Shore, or from the upper Potomac, or from sources hundreds of miles to the north. It is fairly certain however, that by the sixteenth century, the Piscataway were a distinct polity with a distinct society and culture, who lived year-round in permanent villages.
In fact, by 1500, the Piscataway and their [[Algonquian]] neighbors had become so numerous that they gradually supplemented their hunting-gathering subsistence economy with increasingly sophisticated agricultural forms of production. Cultivating vast fields of calorie-rich [[maize]], [[Squash (fruit)|squash]], and [[beans]] -- the production and distribution of which was controlled and facilitated by women -- the Piscataway and other related Algonquian peoples were able to feed their growing communities, even as they continued gathering wild plants from nearby freshwater marshes, and men cleared new fields, hunted, and fished.
* http://www.kuce.org/sb/index.html
[[Category:Charles County, Maryland]]
