The Meherrin, Nottoway and Hocomawanck Indians

Meherrin of North Carolina, Nottoway of Virginia, and Hocomawanck

There are at least a dozen different spellings of the Meherrin tribal name in the area’s European historical records.

The Meherrin (meaning “People of the Muddy Water”) Indian Tribe is of the same linguistic stock as the Cherokee, Tuscarora, and other tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy of New York and Canada.  The Meherrin language has been extinct for years though the art of brain tanning deer hides has survived.  (Really?)  Living as farmers and hunters in the coastal plain of what is now Virginia and North Carolina along the Meherrin River, their closest connections were probably the Nottaway Indians. 

Almost from the inception of the Virginia Colony, tensions over the concept of land ownership existed between the English colonists and the Indians.  It didn’t take long before the Meherrin were hustled farther down the river into what is now Hertford County.  By 1706 they had settled on an abandoned Chowanoke Indian reservation.

It wasn’t until 1986 that the Meherrin Nation became one of eight tribes granted state recognition by North Carolina.  In historic times the tribe numbered no more than 600; currently there is an enrollment of 900+ people.  A Pow-Wow is now held the fourth weekend in October every year on Tribal land outside of Ahoskie that was given to them by a North Carolina treaty in 1726.

The Nottoway Annual Powwow (celebration of the Green Corn Harvest) is held the fourth weekend in July in Courtland, Virginia.  In their native Iroquoian- based language (which they still speak), they call themselves the Cheroenhaka, for “We Are Still Here.”  They were recognized by the state of Virginia in 2010 and live in the Tidewater region of Virginia.  In 1713 Virginia created a reservation for them but as the Nottoway population decreased the land was sold to outsiders and by 1878 the treaty was terminated.  The Federal government doesn’t recognize them as a distinct tribe.

The staples of their cultivation were the three sisters: maize, squash, and beans.  They lived in multi-family homes known as longhouse (today we call them condos)  and surrounded their towns with stockade fences.  By the late 1600’s the moved their main settlement to the mouth of Assamoosick Swamp. Some Nottoway migrated north in the early 1700’s with the Tuscarora who became the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy in New York.  Some joined with the Tuscarora and went to South Carolina.

I Googled “Hocomawanck” and was astonished to find only a single page of links, and several of those were duplicates or “ask.com” references.  That’s gotta be a first – usually there are 8 million sites to select from when one enters a query.