Edith Turner

Edith Turner (ca. 1754 – February or March 1838), sometimes known as Edy Turner or Edie Turner, or by her personal name Wané Roonseraw, was a leader – often styled "chief" or "queen" – among the Nottoway people of Virginia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Life Turner lived in Southampton County, Virginia, and had been active in land transactions since 1794, although her name first appears on a petition to the Virginia General Assembly dating to 1792, marking her earliest appearance in the historical record. She married one William Green, who appears to have been a non-Indian, A tribal census of 1808 listed her employments as "knitting, sewing, and what is usual in common housewifery", and stated that she had two black workers hired for her by white trustees. of the Nottoway language, which became extinct sometime before 1900. A wordlist which she provided to surveyor John Wood in 1820 found its way to Thomas Jefferson, who shared it with Peter Stephen Du Ponceau; it is one of the best surviving sources of information about the language. She knew the tribe's legends, and provided an account of one of them to an anonymous writer who submitted it to The Gentleman's Magazine of London, which published it in 1821.

Turner was named one of the Library of Virginia's Virginia Women in History for 2008.