Indian Tribes of Maryland

Maryland Historical Society

Running through the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland and emptying into the Chesapeake Bay, the Nanticoke River is named after the Nanticoke Indians who resided in a series of villages along its banks. They were first encountered by Captain John Smith during his voyages of 1608. These villages were organized as a complex chiefdom under the authority of a paramount chief or talleck, which the English referred to as an emperor.1

The Nanticoke spoke the Algonquian language. By the early twentieth century, they had lost their native language and today speak English. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Nanticoke were successful in maintaining their traditional cultures in the Nanticoke River area by raising farm crops of corn, beans and squash; hunting, trapping, fishing, crabbing, and water-fowling; and by gathering a variety of native plants and shell fish to supplement their other food resources.2

In 1608, The Nanticoke were involved in the production of marine shell beads, which they used to trade for furs, copper, and other commodities throughout the Chesapeake Bay drainage basin. From the establishment of the Maryland colony in 1634 to the mid 1660s the Nanticoke and the English alternated between neutral or hostile relations. They signed the first of a series of peace treaties in 1668, when English settlers from Maryland and Virginia began moving to the lower Eastern Shore.3

As English settlements expanded, reservations were established for the Nanticoke near Vienna, Maryland and Broad Creek, Delaware and continued as reservations until the Revolutionary War period.4 The Nanticoke accepted the protection of the Six Nation Iroquois in the early eighteenth century when the English began demanding the right to approve the selection of the Nanticoke talleck or emperor.

Many Nanticokes migrated to a village at the Junita and Susquehanna Rivers. Maryland granted permission for this migration in 1644. Some opted to stay in the Chesapeake region, while others joined the northward migration, which took them eventually to the Grand River Reservation in Canada.5 Today, the Nanticoke descendants in Delaware welcome visitors to the Nanticoke Indian Museum and their annual powwow gathering.6

1. Rountree and Davidson 1997: 116.

2. Weslager 1983: Language : 38; Foodways: 82

3. Weslager 1983: 86-87; Rountree and Davidson 1997: 104-106; Maryland Archives XV: 145-148.

4. Rountree and Davidson 1997:132-133, Figure 4-1, 158-159.

5. Weslager 1983: 183; Porter 1987: 44, 48

6. Porter 1987: 84-90.

Porter III, Frank W. The Nanticoke: Indian of North America Series. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Weslager, C. A. The Nanticoke Indians--Past and Present. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.

Rountree, Helen C. and Thomas E. Davidson. Eastern Shore Indians of Virginia and Maryland. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

Porter III, Frank W. Indians of Maryland and Delaware: A Critical Bibliography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

Indian Ceramics of Nanticoke (Townsend ware). Diagnostic Artifacts in Maryland. Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum. www.jefpat.org/diagnostic/index.htm

The Nanticoke Indian Tribe (Delaware) site. Nanticoke Indian Association. www.nanticokeindians.org