Pamunkey Indian Reservation
The Pamunkey Indian Reservation, located along the Pamunkey River adjacent to King William County, Virginia, is the ancestral home of the Pamunkey people and one of the oldest recognized Indian reservations in the country. The Reservation is approximately 1,600 acres in a rural area and is mostly surrounded by the Pamunkey River.
In the past, present, and future, the Pamunkey Indian Reservation is the heart of the Pamunkey community and the seat of a sovereign nation. Pamunkey families still live, work, and enjoy life on the Reservation as countless generations of their ancestors have. This peninsula is possibly the only land left on the East Coast that has never been ceded and is still a home for Pamunkey people and knowledge.
The Reservation holds immense importance to Pamunkey people. It is more than just land: it is the presence of ancestors through storytelling, material culture, and place. This is a place that has always been Pamunkey, where clay is gathered from the river shore and coiled into art, the river provides sustenance of body and soul, and the memory of ancestors who fought for survival lives on here. This land holds the history of Pamunkey. The Pamunkey community cherishes this land and all that came before and will continue the battle to keep this precious place whole, allowing new memories and stories to intertwined with the old.
Long before the colonists ‘discovered’ us, the state or federal government acknowledged us, and the textbooks included us, this land knew us. This land protected us.
History of the Reservation
Pamunkey people have been living on and around the land that is now the Pamunkey Indian Reservation for at least 15,000 years. Tsenacommacah, the area known in English as Tidewater Virginia, was a densely populated, culturally rich, and diverse region of the Eastern Woodlands. Pamunkey people have always been gifted potters, fishermen, hunters, and leaders— cultural traditions that endure to this day.
By the time that Europeans arrived in the late 16th and early 17th-centuries, many of the tribal groups in Tsenacommacah were under the leadership of the Pamunkey paramount chief Mamanatowick Wahunsenacawh, known to the English as Chief Powhatan. The Pamunkey played a vital role in the survival of early English settlements while defending their sovereign right to govern their own people. In 1646, after years of warfare, Necotowance signed a peace treaty with the Virginia General Assembly reserving all area north of the York River as Indian land, officially establishing the Pamunkey Indian Reservation. Following Bacon’s Rebellion in 1677, Cockacoeske, “Queen of the Pamunkey,” further confirmed the Pamunkey’s special status as tributaries to the Crown with her signing of the Treaty of Middle Plantation. This treaty reserved a three-mile area surrounding the boundaries of the Reservation for Pamunkey people. Despite records of lawsuits from Pamunkey people against their English neighbors, tobacco planters continued to encroach upon tribal lands throughout the 18th century. Today, the approximately 1,600 acres the Reservation sits upon constitute the last remaining parcel of the original Pamunkey lands.
The Pamunkey Indian Reservation continued to play an important role in American history throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The Reservation was likely a key stop on the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, the Reservation was occupied by both Union and Confederate forces. The Tribe, breaking with the majority of their King William County neighbors, supported the Union. Many Pamunkey men served as spies and navigators for the Union. After the war, the Southern Claims Commission approved a disproportionate amount of Pamunkey claims for reimbursement of wartime property seizures, speaking to the immense sacrifice and importance of the men and women living on the Pamunkey Indian Reservation. Even so, Virginia tribes faced increasing pressure to dissolve their reservations through the 19th and 20th centuries.
The rise of eugenics in the 20th century further threatened the survival of Pamunkey identity and communities. The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 intended to erase Virginia Indians as a legal classification of people by declaring all non-white people “colored” and banning interracial marriage. Tribes throughout Virginia continued their struggle against violations of their human rights and continued to assert their sovereign rights to exist. This law was not declared unconstitutional until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. Like many African American communities, the tribe built their own schoolhouse on the Reservation in 1909 so Native children from surrounding communities could receive an education. This schoolhouse still stands today.
In the 1930s, the Commonwealth of Virginia established and built a state-funded pottery school on the Reservation. Building upon millennia-old Pamunkey traditions, mid-20th century Pamunkey women produced contemporary pottery for the tourist-based market and generated income for the Reservation community. In 1979, the Tribe opened the Pamunkey Indian Museum, one of the first tribally -run museums on the East Coast.
In 2015, the United States government formally recognized the Pamunkey Indian Tribe as a sovereign Indian nation; the first in Virginia to achieve this status.
Generations of Pamunkey people worked tirelessly to protect their community’s cultural identity and history and will continue to preserve the Reservation-- a resource of national importance.
Climate Change Threats
Climate change poses an imminent threat to the Pamunkey Indian Reservation. The Reservation is surrounded by a rising river and marsh on three sides and a sinking railroad embankment on the fourth. Since the 1600s, the surrounding water has historically kept tribal land safe from encroaching squatters but is increasingly risky as climate conditions change so rapidly.
Shore erosion and rising sea levels are perhaps the most pressing threat to the Reservation and its residents and resources. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) models predict that sea levels will rise 3 to 6 feet by 2100. While tides are rising, the land is also sinking due to ground subsidence caused by groundwater pumping, mining, and natural processes. Reservation-specific modeling by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science projects that the majority of Reservation land will be underwater and wholly inaccessibly in the next 75 years. This would be life-altering for Pamunkey people.
Increasing storm frequency and strength also pose great threats to the protection of the Reservation. Currently, there is only one road onto the Reservation, which is easily flooded. A major rain event could easily prevent residents from evacuating or receiving emergency aid.
Climate change threatens both the future and the past. Archeological resources have the potential to tell us more about the deep history of Pamunkey people on this incredibly important piece of land. Archeological resources are non-renewable, meaning they are gone forever once they are destroyed. Like many rural historic areas, long-term plowing has already altered—though not destroyed—the potential for intact, scientifically sound archeological deposits. Erosion, flooding, and ground subsidence have the potential to ruin archeological resources remaining beneath the surface of the ground.
The Tribe was honored to be included in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual list of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places of 2025. You can read more about the threats from climate change and the Tribe’s preservation efforts at savingplaces.org/places/Pamunkey.
