CK
At the pow-wow today, I met the current chief of the Piscataway. (A little web research shows I was not paying attention to her tribe's full name: two groups are using the name Piscataway, right now, and I am not seeing her name associated with either. If she does e-mail me later, I will say more about her.) She knew "Kittamaqund" as a man, the name of her tribe's "last" werowance. I learned of the name as a man's from that fine source, Patrick Price's "Flashbacks" cartoon in the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, a 1959 chilren's book on Maryland Indians names "Kittamaqundi" an "important town" of the Piscataway.

Finally, a book about Virginia's Northern Neck gives us the "romance" of the christianized "emporess" Kittamaqund (Mary), who married Englishman Giles Brent c. 1645. He took her south of the Potomac; they lived on Aquia Creek. They had three children and she died young.

For this figure, in the mid-1960s, the central Virginia Girl Scout council named its new camp on the Northern Neck. Our previous property, in Bon Air (Richmond's tiny Victorian summer retreat) had been named for Pocahontas, so it made some sense: two camps named for christianized Indian women. Camp Kittamaqund's first generation of campers prefer to pronounce the name "kit TOM a kund"; in the 80s, I learned that The Right Way to say it is "kit ta ma KUND" -- not "kit ta ma KWAND." The children's book suggests "kit-ta-ma-QUN-di" for the town. The Piscataway guests at today's event could not give an authoritative opinion. We all agreed that language is one of the many broken links for 21st century Americans to their pre-1607 American ancestors.

Pronunciation may remain a mystery, but some day soon, when I am out of school again, I will have time for recreational research. When that happy day comes, my two high priority projects: (1) Nominating the Upper Mattaponi's school and church for the state and national registers of historic places, and (2) Some Kittamaqund research.


Sources

Haynie, Miriam. The Stronghold: A Story of the Historic Northern Neck of Virginia. Richmond, Va. : The Dietz Press, 1959.

Manakee, Harold R. Indians of Early Maryland. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1959.