Powhatan Confederacy

Okeus


...more of an empire made up of several Algonquian tribes



by Pat Stevens

The Powhatan Confederacy stretched from the Potomac river south along the Virginia coast into upper North Carolina, and west to the fall line of the rivers. The Powhatans were a part of the late Woodlands culture of the southeastern part of the United States. Their tongue was a derivative of Algonquian on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay and the Hudson and Delaware river basins. They were polytheistic in their faith, with the major deities being Okeus, responsible for the evil in the world, and Ahone, a god of good. In her wonderful work "Pocahontas," Grace Steele Woodward writes that Okeus was annually appeased from his evil with human sacrifice; "the priests would gather the entire Powhatan community in the woods, and after chanting their supplications... around a great fire, would present two or three of the Powhatan children to the god. Okeus would then mysteriously communicate to the priests the names of those to be sacrificed, and not even the son of a werowance was spared from death on the sacrificial altar if he was unfortunate enough to be selected." The beneficent god Ahone was praised by the Powhatans bathing in the rivers or streams each morning at sunrise and then standing arms raised inside a circle of dried tobacco to call their prayers. Grace Woodward tells us the colonists reported these chants as the men howling "like wolves" and foaming at the mouth. They also practiced a ritualistic torture, she notes, dismembering the living bodies of captives and tossing the pieces on a fire, or sometimes bashing the captive's head on a stone block with a mallet or club. "Scalps salvaged from the ceremony were hung on a line stretched between trees-- to be admired and appreciated."

By the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the late 16th century, the Powhatan chief, Wahunsonacock (or Wahunsenacawh), was called by the tribe's name, Powhatan. He is described by Captain John Smith in his "General Historie...." in the early 1600s as "a tall well proportioned man with a sower look, his head somewhat gray, his beard so thin it seemeth none at all, his age near sixtye of a very capable and hardy body to endure any labor." Succession of the ruler passed from brother to brother and so on, then to sisters and their heirs.