In this morning’s Sketch and Coffee Live at 5:30am Texas time, I sketched a figurine of a Powhatan mother and child sitting by a campfire.
Sketch & Coffee, Live! is streamed daily at 5:30am, Texas Time, at the YouTubes
That fire had me thinking about how this scene wasn’t just a pretty picture. For the Powhatans, and all ancient cultures, the fire was the evening’s entertainment, classroom, and living archive all rolled into one.
I dove into some of the stories they might’ve shared. There’s the creation tale where Ahone, a benevolent god, made a water world and spirit animals tried to make it livable. Muskrat was the only one to succeed, diving down to bring up the mud that became land. Then there’s Nanabozho, the rabbit spirit, who watched spiders spin their webs and taught people to make fishing nets. Nanabozho was also considered a trickster among other tribes. These weren’t just bedtime stories, they were survival lessons disguised as myth.
One of my favorites today was a tale explaining why there are so many kinds of people. It starts with everyone living underground until a mole found the surface. A series of separations followed – some people trapped below, others split by rivers, mountains, and forests, until the world was filled with different tribes. It’s poetic, and it hits harder when you think about how many of those voices are gone now.
That’s the sad part. Powhatan, as a spoken language, is gone. No one alive has heard it spoken by someone who knew it natively. All that remains are scraps written down by colonists. It’s the same pattern I’ve seen in my own family, Cherokee words my great-grandmother never passed on to my father. German my grandmother didn’t teach my mom. Languages and stories disappear not in one big event, but little by little, through attrition.
So here’s the takeaway: share your family stories. Write them down, tell them out loud, pass them to your kids. Because whether you’re Powhatan, Cherokee, German, or anything else, the day you stop telling your stories is the day they start disappearing.
Click here to watch the Powhatan Mother and Child episode of Sketch & Coffee, Live!
Also, if you or a teacher friend would like a 20-30 minute lesson plan about the stories and traditions of the Powhatan peoples, you are welcome to download and share this one:
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