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Powhatan (Wahunsenacawh)

Powhatan (Wahunsenacawh)

1547 CE1618 CE · Tsenacommacah (Powhatan)

Wahunsenacawh, known to the English as Powhatan, was the paramount chief who by the early 1600s had brought some thirty Algonquian-speaking communities of tidewater Virginia under the Tsenacommacah paramountcy. He was the leader the Jamestown colonists encountered when they landed in 1607, and his people alternately traded with and fought the struggling settlement. His daughter Matoaka, better known as Pocahontas, became a famous intermediary between the two peoples. He died in 1618, and the confederacy he built soon came into open war with the expanding colony.

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Stop 1 of 1Seat Of Power

Tsenacommacah (Powhatan)

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The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Powhatan (Wahunsenacawh)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works

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