Opossunoquonuske

Opossunoquonuske (variant forms: Oppussoquionuske or Opposunoquonuske) was a Weroansqua of an Appomattoc town near the mouth of the Appomattox River. Weroansqua (or Weroance) is an Algonquian word meaning leader or commander among the Powhatan confederacy of Virginia coast and Chesapeake Bay region. She was known as the queen of Appamatuck. The community she led was large enough to provide an estimated twenty warriors to the Powhatan Confederacy.

Native women leaders appear in numerous colonial records, and Opossunoquonuske is among that list. Just as Hernando de Soto met a woman he called the Lady of Cofitachequi, John Smith mentions Opossunoquonuske, “Queen of Appomattoc”. Even as colonization curtailed more direct forms of political and military leadership for women, later records attest to the ways in which many Native women maintained sociocultural authority.

Early descriptions Various English settlers gave the first recorded descriptions of Opossunoquonuske. Captain John Smith described her as “young and comely". According to historian Helen Rountree, Captain Christopher Newport gave one of the fullest descriptions of her. Newport was an English privateer and ship captain who helped to establish the first English colony in North America at Jamestown in 1607. According to Newport, in May of 1607, when Newport, Smith, and an exploring party sailed upriver from Jamestown, the “Queene of Apamatuck kindely entreated” them to visit “her people”. He wrote of her as a woman whose name was Opossunoquonuske, was the sister of Coquonasum, the king or werowance of Appomattoc, a town under Powhatan’s dominion. Opossunoquonuske’s kinship ties entitled her to rule in her own right. According to Helen Rountree, when the satellite town at their river’s mouth was burned, Opossunoquonuske, its weroansqua, was wounded.

Opechancanough led the Powhatan in the Second (1622-1626) and Third (1644-1646) Anglo-Powhatan Wars. He began the second war with a coordinated attack on English settlements known as the Indian massacre of 1622. These wars marked a high point of Algonquian resistance to English colonization. In 1646, Opechancanough was captured by English colonists and taken to Jamestown, where he was killed by a settler assigned to guard him.

The London Company The London Company, officially known as the Virginia Company of London, was a division of the Virginia Company with responsibility for colonizing the east coast of North America, concurred the documents of Gabriel Archer, an explorer who was the appointed the official note taker of this trip. Historian Helen Rountree and Thomas Appleton explain that this trip had specific instructions from the London Company; “They were to establish trade with the Native people, whom they considered savages, while encouraging them to abandon their traditional ways and become Christians.” Connecting this to Opossunoquonuske, exploring encountered the Arrohattoc Tribe also known as the Powhatan, as the explorers believed it to be the name of the town because of an Aboriginal leader named Powhatan ruled some thirty tribes. The land was surrounded by fields of tobacco corn, beans, and gourds. As the Englishmen departed, Opossunoquonuske suggested that they stop down the river to meet one of her brothers, a werowance name Opechancanough. There are claims that while the early English documentary sources clearly indicate that Opossunoquonuske’s village was on the north side of the Appomattox River, the presence of considerable Late Woodland material at the City Point itself suggests that a village may have been present on the bluff prior to English exploration. Opossunoquonuske, may have observed or heard of the hospitality and may have wanted to establish her own relations with the newcomers. Her queenly bearing impressed the English visitors. As Archer noted, they saw her “comminge in the same fashion of state as Powhatan or Arrohattoc, yea rather with more Majesty”.