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The Piscataway Indians long were among the most numerous and powerful native people in the Chesapeake region. From their homeland on Piscataway Creek, by the early seventeenth century they had come to exercise some authority over every other Native American group on the north bank of the Potomac River. Although Piscataway fortunes declined as the Maryland colony grew, they are to this day the best-known Indian nation in Maryland.

Origins
Some maintain that the ancestors of the Piscatways came to the Potomac River some ten thousand years ago, and came together as a nation in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Other evidence suggests that the Piscataways migrated from the Eastern Shore, or from the upper Potomac, or from sources hundreds of miles to the north. It is fairly certain that by the sixteenth century at the latest the Piscataways were a distinct nation of people living year-round in permanent villages.

Economy and Society
By 800 C.E. a few people living along the Potomac had begun to experiment with maize as a supplement to their ordinary diets of fish, game, and wild plants. By 1500, the Piscataways and their neighbors had become so numerous that they had to cultivate fields of calorie-rich maize, squash, and beans to feed their growing communities. The Piscataways nevertheless continued to take full advantage of all their territory offered. Women farmed but also gathered wild plants from nearby freshwater marshes; men cleared new fields, hunted, and fished.

By 1500, too, most of the prime village locations along the Potomac had been claimed, sometimes by force. Part of the competition resulted from natural population growth, but the onset after 1300 of a centuries-long "Little Ice Age" also drove people from upland and northern communities southward to the warmer climes of the Potomac basin, where growing seasons were still long enough to grow maize. The increasing conflict over territory was enormously destructive; indeed, by 1600 raiders from the north had destroyed almost every community above the Great Falls.

The villages below the fall line survived by consolidating authority in the hands of hereditary chiefs who could exact tribute, send men to war, and coordinate the resistance against northern raiders and rival claimants to their homelands. A hierarchy of places and rulers emerged: hamlets without hereditary rulers paid tribute to a nearby village whose chief, or werowance, appointed a "lesser king" to each dependent settlement. By the end of the sixteenth century, each werowance on the north bank of the Potomac was in turn subject to a single paramount chief: the ruler of the Piscataways, known as the Tayac.

Colonial Encounters
When Virginians began to visit the Potomac in 1608, rivals and reluctant subjects of the Tayac hoped that the newcomers would alter the balance of power in the region. This strategy worked: Virginians in search of trading partners consistently allied themselves with the Piscataways' enemies. By the early 1630s the Tayac's hold over some of his subordinate werowances had been much weakened. When the first Maryland colonists arrived in 1634, however, the Tayac managed to turn the newcomers into allies. The Tayac shrewdly bestowed upon the new settlers an Indian hamlet (soon renamed St. Mary's City). The original inhabitants of the hamlet had planned to abandon the site anyway, as it was dangerously vulnerable to attacks from Susquehannock Indians coming up the Potomac River. Now, as allies of the Tayac, the English were bound to serve as a buffer against further Susquehannock raids.

The benefits of having Marylanders as neighbors were short-lived. Maryland was initially too weak to pose a significant threat, but when the English gained strength in the 1650s they turned against their Indian allies. By 1668 the western shore nations were confined to two reservations: one on the Wicomico River, and another on the Piscataways' traditional homeland. Many refugees from the dispossessed nations came to live with the Piscataways. Maryland authorities even forced the Piscataways to accept the hated Susquehannocks (recently defeated by the Five Nations Iroquois of New York) on the reservation. The result was a horrific war in 1675 in which the Susquehannocks were expelled from Maryland, first by a callous act of English treachery, and thereafter by Piscataway warriors who leapt at the opportunity to attack their ancient Susquehannock enemies.

Unfortunately for the Piscataways, the Susquehannocks joined forces with the Iroquois. Joined by their new Five Nations allies, Susquehannock warriors returned again and again to attack the Piscataways. The English provided little help, for Marylanders increasingly desired Piscataway land rather than Piscataway allies. Finally, in 1697, the Tayac moved far up the Potomac to escape the encroaching English. Within five years he had relocated again, this time to the Susquehanna River. There his people, now known as "Conoys," could live under Iroquois protection. Soon, however, even Pennsylvania proved unsafe, leading some Conoys to resettle in Canada.

Piscataways Today
Despite this tragic series of events, some Piscataways stayed behind rather than migrate to Pennsylvania. Though destroyed as an independent political entity, they survived in small communities. Their presence often went unnoticed by outsiders, partly because they had to lay low at a time when their neighbors harbored viciously racist attitudes towards Native Americans.

Today, however, Piscataway and Conoy people are re-emerging. Like Native American groups all over the United States, the nation is enjoying a renaissance. Achieving federal recognition is a difficult process, and Maryland's standards for recognition, adopted in 1988, are even more stringent. Currently two different groups seek to represent the Piscataway people (the Piscataway Nation and the Piscatway-Conoy Confederacy), but neither has succeeded in gaining recognition. Most recently, Governor Robert Ehrlich denied a Piscataway-Conoy Confederacy petition for state recognition in 2003.

—Jim Rice