Copyright notice

This article is from the Encyclopedia of North Carolina edited by William S. Powell. Copyright © 2006 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other use directly to the publisher.

Printer-friendly page

Pasquotank Indians

by Michael D. Green, 2006

"Indians Cooking Fish." From the John White drawings in Ashe's History of North Carolina. Courtesy of UNC's Documenting the American South. The Pasquotank Indians, also known as the Paspatank, were last identified in the early eighteenth century on the Pasquotank River north of Albemarle Sound. They were probably part of the Weapemeoc group. An Algonquian-speaking people, the Pasquotank farmed, hunted, fished, and lived in villages often surrounded by palisades made of logs. They were not mentioned in the documents of the Roanoke Colony, but in the early eighteenth century Englishman John Lawson described them as a tiny tribe numbering 10 warriors, suggesting a total population of less than 50.

References:

Christian F. Feest, "North Carolina Algonquians," in Bruce Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15 (1978).

Maurice A. Mook, "Algonkian Ethnohistory of the Carolina Sound," Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 34 (15 June, 15 July 1944).

Image Credit:

"Indians Cooking Fish." From the John White drawings in Ashe's History of North Carolina. Courtesy of UNC's Documenting the American South. Available from https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/mcpherson/mcpherson.html#p76a (accessed May 23, 2012).

Subjects: 
American Indians
Authors: 
Green, Michael D.
Origin - location: 
Coastal Plain
From: 
Encyclopedia of North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press.

1 January 2006 | Green, Michael D.