Draft Interpretive Plan Join the adventure! - Captain John Smith ...

Childcare was in the women’s domain. Daughters were instructed in the women’s arts,
but much teaching and learning was by example. Sons watched their fathers prepare for
warfare or hunting, and accompanied them when they were old enough. Discipline was
enforced by teasing and mocking to ensure adequate conformity, so that the group
benefited from the contributions of each member. Mistakes could prove deadly in
hunting or warfare; skill had to be acquired quickly. Although both men’s and women’s
work could be dangerous, demanding, or tedious (depending on the season and what
needed to be done), there was also ample time for games, festivals, dances, and other
forms of recreation and relaxation.
Most of the Chesapeake tribes were matrilineal as far as matters of inheritance and
relationships were concerned. They were not ruled by women, but descent and ancestry
were calculated through mothers, maternal grandmothers, and so on. This probably
confused the English, whose system was patrileneal, and who therefore may have made
incorrect assumptions regarding Native authority.
The Indians who lived near the Bay used a network of paths and other routes through the
woods to hunt, conduct raids, visit friends and relatives in other towns, and trade. They
commonly used the Bay and its tributaries as watery highways, traveling by dugout log
canoe. The vessels usually were made of cypress, laboriously chopped down, de-limbed,
and towed behind a canoe to a “shipyard” where the log was hollowed out. The slow,
tedious process of turning the log into a boat involved repeatedly burning and then
scraping small areas of wood with shells.
Despite the many similarities among the various tribes throughout the Chesapeake Bay
region, there were several differences, including language. During John Smith’s
voyages, he sometimes relied on Indians to serve as translators between one tribe and
another. Most of the Chesapeake Indians spoke languages in the Algonquian linguistic
group, but the farther apart one tribe lived from another, the greater the likelihood that
they would speak different dialects. Most tribes in the region belonged to the Iroquoian
linguistic group, but the Susquehannock had a different dialect altogether. West of the
rivers’ fall lines, many tribes were Siouan speakers. Native translators were common,
especially since the Indian trading networks sometimes extended for hundreds of miles.
The Chesapeake people Smith encountered were generally more similar to each other
than they were different, regardless of the polity in which they lived, except for their
dialects. Two exceptions were the people he found near the head of the Bay: the
mysterious Massawomeck and the Susquehannock. The Massawomeck, stories about
whom the other Indians had told Smith, appeared in their birch-bark canoes and
obviously were not native to the immediate environs of the Bay. Their exact status and
where they lived is hotly debated (the upper Potomac is a possibility), but they were
much feared by the other Indians. The second tribe, the Susquehannock, greatly
impressed Smith as “the strangest people in all those countries, both in language and
attire.” Their language, which was Iroquoian, was strange indeed to Smith. They resided
up the Susquehanna River, apparently (according to archaeological investigations) at a
single large town on the western bank near present-day Washington Boro in
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