The Piscataway or Piscatawa , are an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands. They spoke the now extinct Algonquian Piscataway, a regional dialect similar to Nanticoke. The neighboring Haudenosaunee called them the Conoy, with whom they partly merged after a massive decline of population and rise in colonial violence following two centuries of interactions with European settlers. Some descendants of the Piscataway are citizens of the federally recognized Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation in Ontario, Canada.
In the United States, two groups that claim to be descended from the Piscataway people received state recognition as Native American tribes from Maryland in 2012: the Piscataway Indian Nation (retrieved 4 Jan 2011) and Piscataway Conoy Tribe.Piscataway Conoy Tribe (retrieved 15 May 2025) Within the latter group was included the Piscataway Conoy Confederacy and Sub-Tribes and the Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians. All these groups descend from the Western Bank of the Chesapeake, spanning across Maryland, Virginia, D.C, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and are primarily located in Southern Maryland. None are federally recognized as tribes.
Name The Piscataway were recorded by the English (in days before standardized spelling) as the Pascatowies, Paschatoway, Pazaticans, Pascoticons, Paskattaway, Pascatacon, Piscattaway, and Puscattawy.
They were also referred to by the names of their tributary villages: Moyaone, Accotick, or Accokicke, or Accokeek; Potapaco, or Portotoack; Sacayo, or Sachia; Zakiah, and Yaocomaco, or Youcomako, or Yeocomico, or Wicomicons.
The name "Kanawha" is also used for the Piscataway.
Related Algonquian-speaking tribes included the Anacostan, Chincopin, Choptico, Doeg, or Doge, or Taux; Tauxeneen, Mattawoman, and Pamunkey. More distantly related tribes included the Accomac, Assateague, Choptank, Nanticoke, Patuxent, Pocomoke, Tockwogh and Wicomoco.
Language The Piscataway language was part of the large Algonquian language family. Jesuit missionary Father Andrew White translated the Catholic catechism into Piscataway in 1640, and other English missionaries compiled Piscataway-language materials., Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, 23 July 2010 (retrieved 4 Jan 2010)
The Piscataway dialect is largely dissipating among tribal members; current efforts of the community include learning the foundation of the Algonquin language while conducting linguistic studies to revive their dialect for generations. A small number of language speakers, none being fully fluent in the Piscataway dialect, along with institutional barriers and lack of funding for linguistic studies are major challenges in revitalizing the Piscataway Language dialect.
Geography
The Piscataway by 1600 were on primarily the north bank of the Potomac River in what is now Charles, southern Prince George's, and western St. Mary's counties in southern Maryland, according to John Smith's 1608 map, "wooded; near many waterways". This also notes the several Patuxent River settlements that were under some degree of Piscataway suzerainty. The Piscataway settlements appear in that same area on maps through 1700.and on a map of the Piscataway lands in Kenneth Bryson, Images of America: Accokeek (Arcadia Publishing, 2013) pp. 10-11, derived from Alice and Henry Ferguson, The Piscataway Indians of Southern Maryland (Alice Ferguson Foundation, 1960), pp. 8 (map) and p. 11: "By the beginning of Maryland (English) settlement, pressure from the Susquehannocks had reduced ... the Piscataway 'empire' ... to a belt bordering the Potomac south of the falls and extending up the principal tributaries. Roughly, the 'empire' covered the southern half of present Prince George's County and all, or nearly all, of Charles County."
Traditional culture The Piscataway relied more on agriculture than did many of their neighbors, which enabled them to live in permanent villages. They lived near waters navigable by canoes. Their crops included maize, several varieties of beans, melons, pumpkins, squash and (ceremonial) tobacco, which were mainly bred and cultivated by women. Men used bows and arrows to hunt bears, elk, deer, and wolves, as well as smaller game such as beavers, squirrels, partridges, and wild turkeys. They also did fishing and oyster and clam harvesting. Women also gathered berries, nuts and tubers in season to supplement their diets.Ferguson pp. 15-16
As was common among the Algonquian peoples, Piscataway villages consisted of several individual houses protected by a defensive log palisade.A John White drawing of such a traditional village, possibly in Tidewater North Carolina, is published in Kenneth Bryson, Images of America: Accokeek (Arcadia Publishing, 2013), p. 11Ferguson, p. 13, cites Duel, Sloan and Pierce, The New World (1946, Stefan Larant, Ed.) Traditional houses were rectangular and typically high and long, a type of longhouse, with barrel-shaped roofs covered with bark or woven mats. A hearth occupied the center of the house with a smoke hole overhead.
History
Pre-contact A succession of Indigenous peoples occupied the Chesapeake and Tidewater region, arriving according to archeologists' estimates from roughly 3,000 to 10,000 years ago. Those people of Algonquian stock who would coalesce into the Piscataway nation, lived in the Potomac River drainage area since at least AD 1300.Ferguson, p. 11, refers to Robert L. Stephenson, The Prehistoric People of Accokeek Creek Sometime around AD 800, peoples living along the Potomac had begun to cultivate maize as a supplement to their ordinary hunting-gathering diet of fish, game, and wild plants.
The Piscataway, represented by the Potomac Creek archaeological culture, was established by Owasco Culture Algonquian-Speakers coming from the Susquehanna River Valley, and while the administrative center of the Piscataway Werowance (and later tayac) known as Moyaone was first established in 1100, their migration did not end until 1300 when the administrative center of the Werowance of Patawomeck was established.Clark, Wayne E. "Algonquian Cultures of the Delaware and Susquehanna River Drainages: A Migration Model." William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research, 2019, Virginia Department of Historic Resources, www.dhr.virginia.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Algonquian-Cultures-5-6-19-2.pdf. Accessed 12 Sept. 2025.
By 1300, the Piscataway and their Algonquian tribal neighbors had become increasingly numerous because of their sophisticated agriculture, which provided calorie-rich maize, beans and squash. These crops added surplus to their hunting-gathering subsistence economy and supported greater populations. The women cultivated and processed numerous varieties of maize and other plants, breeding them for taste and other characteristics. The Piscataway and other related peoples were able to feed their growing communities. They also continued to gather wild plants from nearby freshwater marshes. The men cleared new fields, hunted, and fished.
The onset of a centuries-long "Little Ice Age" around 1300 put pressure on groups to migrate, which in turn caused conflict with local groups. One of these groups was the Montgomery Complex, in the Potomac Piedmont & Ridge and Valley. Starting from 1300, the populations moved themselves into fortified towns, likely from outside conflict with Keyser/Luray Complex peoples migration.
The Keyser/Luray Complex had migrated to the region in order to dominate the lucrative Conestoga and Carolina Paths, which intersects in the region. Chiefs, or lords, all the way in Florida would export marine shell north through these trails, to be traded with groups in the Northeast where these marine shells hold ceremonial value.
This series of wars would tighten their alliance with the neighboring Piscataway, who shared a similar material culture and likely were both members of an ancestral defensive alliance that stretched as far north as modern day Albany under the Mahican Confederation. This alliance was described to be "were so united, that whatsoever nation attacked the one, it was the same as attacking the whole." The Montgomery Complex were eventually forced to flee to the coast to their Piscataway allies in the late 14th to early 15th centuries. In order to accommodate the new immigrants, and possibly also to aid the war effort, the Potomac Complex gradually centralized rule under the existing class of hereditary elite, indicated during contact period by their copper fish headdresses. These elite were composed of Werowances, or regional chiefs, Wisos, who were held roles of priestly elders or great men and, most importantly, the Tayac, known to the English as "Emperor of Piscataway."
The first Tayac was the Talak Uttapoingassinem of the Nanticokes from across the Chesapeake Bay, another member of the ancestral defensive alliance. Likely through his power as both Talak of Nanticoke and Tayac of Piscataway (including the new Montgomery Complex immigrants), he held command over both the Patawomecks in the South and the Susquehannocks in the North. Susquehannocks were the name given by Algonquians to the residents of the Susquehanna River (which translates to "muddy river"), therefore it was likely that the Susquehannocks controlled by Uttapoingassinem were not the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks encountered in historic times, but the likely Algonquian-speaking Shenks Ferry archaeological culture that predated the historic Iroquoian Susquehannocks. This is further supported by the similarity in material culture and the belief of some scholars of a migration out of Maryland being the origin of the Shenks Ferry culture. The Shenks Ferry Susquehannock might've subsumed themselves under Uttapoingassinem as a form of protection against the encroaching Andaste/Iroquoian-Speaking Susquehannock, seeing that palisades, castles and fortifications pop up among the Shenks Ferry Susquehannock around the same period a few decades after the Montgomery Complex moved in with the Piscataway (and presumably when Uttapoingassinem assumed control). Control over the Patawomecks is also supported by their own oral history which states some generations ago they were in allied union with the Piscataways.
Over time, the ties between the constituent groups of Uttapoingassinem's polity disintegrated. The Shenks Ferry Susquehannock's defense came too late; their northern sites begin to disappear a decade after the establishment of the fortifications in ~1450. They probably retreated South to create the villages of Ozinies and Tockwogh. The Patawomecks meanwhile, drifted away, 2 centuries later becoming bitter enemies of the Piscataway under their own Werowance. The Nanticoke too, likely split apart because of their patrilineal succession custom, as opposed to the Piscataway traditionally matrilineal succession. Despite this, relations remained amicable between the two "emperors," who recognize each other as family and remained in the ancestral defensive alliance.
17th century and English colonization