In north central Virginia there is a local tale--The Legend of Jump Mountain, which purports to explain the origins of the Hayes Creek Indian Burial Mound. A highly romantic legend, it immortalizes post colonial intertribal warfare during the early nineteenth century while ignoring the antiquity of the mound and the local descendants of its…

Obscured by the invasive expansion of an aggressive Iroquois confederacy, there exists a remnant population of eastern Siouan peoples known as Tutelos amid the Six Nations Reserve at Grand River, Ontario. While there is a general dearth of source materials for the Tutelo Indians of Virginia, there is an interesting correspondence between a Native…

As suggested in the title "An Odyssey among the Iroquois," there is an epic sense of classical ironic drama in finding the Tutelo among the Hodenosaunee, Great League of the Iroquois. Classified amid the Monacan Division of eastern Siouan nations, the Tutelo together with the Saponi were known as Nahyssans and they were one of three…

In 1948, Library of Congress scholar William Gilbert wrote: "Indian blood still remains noticeable in our eastern States population in spite of the depletions arising from over 300 years of wars, invasions by disease and white men from Europe and black men from Africa." Noting that Virginia's surviving Indian groups tended to retain…