“To Rule by Customes”: Powhatan Assertions of Territorial Possessions against the Virginia Company, 1607–1624

This article examines Powhatan assertions of territorial possession in the context of English colonization in the Chesapeake watershed during the early seventeenth century. The Powhatans expressed territorial possession through a broad range of practices including inheritance, conquest, the physical occupation of land, topographical marking, and ceremonies. This is especially evident during the first two years of the colony (1607–9), when the Powhatans first became entangled with English colonists from the Virginia Company of London. During the Powhatan-English war (1609–14) and the period of an uneasy peace between 1614 and 1622, the Powhatans communicated their rights of possession through military actions and diplomatic rhetoric. Following their successful siege of Jamestown in 1622, the Powhatans and other Chesapeake Algonquian nations continued to maintain their territorial possessions through the defense of their cornfields. By focusing on these Powhatan legal claims, this investigation challenges the assumption that Indigenous traditions of law had little impact on English colonial expansion in the Chesapeake. Instead, the article argues that Powhatan assertions of territorial possessions defied the Virginia Company on a legal and cultural level, unsettling the assumption that Indigenous peoples’ uses of law are a characteristically modern—as opposed to a deep historical—phenomenon.