The Women’s Role within the Eastern Siouan Tribes of Virginia’s Interior
Join us in honoring Native American Heritage Month this November with a special Lunch & Learn Lecture with guest speaker Victoria Ferguson on Friday, November 10 at 12 pm ET.
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The November 10th presentation by guest speaker Victoria Ferguson will highlight the emergence of Eastern Woodland women of Virginia’s interior as the dominant force and foundation of their tribal groups. Her research has found that the matrilineal culture developed around the family ties of the female’s bloodline, and that the female’s line was used to trace clans back to their beginning. Clans carried such names as deer, bear, wolf, and turtle. Women’s roles extended to cover matters such as who would be responsible for a particular job, who could and could not marry, who someone was buried with, which town they lived in, and who would be chief of a village or town. Women managed a great deal of work which served as a driving force within communities until European colonization destroyed their tribal structure and their functioning societies.
Victoria Ferguson is an enrolled citizen of the Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia and is a graduate of Marshall University. Victoria has a background in researching scientific methodologies to support historical information. She has spent 30 years seeking first-person documentation and archaeological information to help explain and support theories on the daily living habits of the Eastern Siouan populations up through the early European colonization period. She has written and presented work at Virginia Tech, Washington and Lee, Sweet Briar College, James Madison University, Mary Baldwin, and a number of archaeological conferences. She has also been featured in two PBS documentaries: Virginia Indians: Reclaiming our Heritage and Pocahontas Revealed. She currently serves as the Program Director for Historic Solitude/Fraction Site on the campus of Virginia Tech.
Citizens of the Monacan Indian Nation are Descended from Virginia and North Carolina Eastern Siouan Cultural and Linguistic Groups
The Monacan Indian Nation is a federally recognized sovereign tribe, headquartered on Bear Mountain in Amherst County. Citizens of the Nation are descended from Virginia and North Carolina Eastern Siouan cultural and linguistic groups, and our ancestral territory includes Virginia west of the fall line of the rivers, sections of southeastern West Virginia, and portions of northern North Carolina.
This event will be held on Friday, November 10, 2023 at 12:00pm ET at the Hitt Archaeology Center located on the grounds of the Historic Germanna Visitor Center. Guests are invited to attend in person or online. RSVP to join us
Historic Germanna Visitor Center is located at 2062 Germanna Highway Locust Grove, VA 22508, in Orange County, VA.
Made possible in part by a grant from
Travel to Germany with the Germanna Foundation