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What's
in a name_
The
Susquehannock Indians were living along—what we now
call—the Susquehanna River and its branches from
the north end of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland across
Pennsylvania into southern New York. The tribe of the
Susquehannock Indians was thriving and they were the dominant
tribe in this region when the Europeans first made contact
with them in the early years of the 1600s.
Not
much is known, however, about the culture of the Susquehannocks
because their villages were inland and not often visited
by settlers before they had been decimated by epidemic
diseases and wars with other Indian tribes. Archaeologists
have found out that the Susquehannocks were mostly farming
and fishing people. In the Spring, they would plant maize,
beans and squash in the fields in their villages, after
which they would moved south near the Chesapeake Bay to
fish and gather shellfish. Then in the Fall, the Susquehannocks
again returned to their villages to harvest their crops
and to hunt.
According
to some, the name Susquehannock is derived from the Algonquian
word Susquehanough, which meaning varies from "people
at the falls," and "people of the Muddy River,"
to "People of a well-watered land." In his book
"Indians in Pennsylvania" Paul Wallace notes
that this name, "Susquehannock," was not the
name the tribe called itself. Captain Smith apparently
picked it up from his interpreter, who is believed to
have been a member of the Powhatan tribe. The nearby Delaware
Indians called the same tribe the "Minquas."
And the European colonists even had some other names.
The French called them Andaste or Andastes from their
Huron name Andastoerrhonon and the Dutch and Swedes used
the Delaware name of Minquas meaning "stealthy"
or "treacherous." The French also used the term
"Gandastogues," meaning "people of the
blackened ridge pole," but what the tribe actually
called themselves is lost and may never be known...
References
and further reading
Several
Watershed Radio programs feature Native American history.
You can search the archive
or see a list of topics.
Learn for example about the Piscataway
Indians who hunted and fished near the Rhode River
in Edgewater, Maryland.
Visit
the following three links to learn more about the Susquehannock
Indians...or whatever they were called:
