Native American Tribes in Virginia

Description

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! All of the Commonwealth of Virginia used to be Virginia Indian territory, an area estimated to have been occupied by indigenous peoples for more than 12,000 years. Their population has been estimated to have been about 50,000. Today, tribal members of the eight state-recognized tribes number about 5,000. Collectively they own fewer than 2,000 acres of land. Only two of these tribes, the Pamunkey and Mattaponi, still retain reservation lands assigned by treaties signed with the English in the 1600s.Documentation suggests that Spanish explorers entered what is now Virginia in two separate places decades before the English founded Jamestown. They had charted the eastern Atlantic coastline north of Florida by 1525. In 1609, Ecija, seeking to deny the English claim, asserted that Lucas Vzquez de Aylln’s failed colony of San Miguel de Gualdape, which lasted only the three months of winter 1526-27, had been near Jamestown, but modern scholars place this effort, the first European colony within the US, in Georgia.