

For thousands of years before the first Europeans and Africans arrived in the Northern Neck, Tsenacomoco (land) was home to thriving Indigenous communities. Indigenous ancestors hunted, fished, oystered, and maintained their cultures on this bountiful land. Early English records named dozens of Indigenous groups and settlements between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers.
Soon after European encroachment on their land, these Indigenous people began to move through the landscape, combining with other communities to resist colonial pressures and survive. A landscape that had sustainably supported seasonal fishing and hunting camps, hamlets, and villages became a place dotted with the hallmarks of an extractive colonial economy, including plantation houses, housing for enslaved people, fences, livestock, and vast fields of crops, such as tobacco, that taxed the environment.
Despite the upheaval of the past four centuries, Indigenous communities in the region have survived, adapted, and maintained their identities and cultures. The Rappahannock and Patawomeck people continue to thrive in the Northern Neck and retain connections to this land. Here in this ancient landscape where people once paddled dugout canoes, speared fish, hunted, and collected oysters, their descendants now fish with commercial nets and traps, hike the trails, and kayak on the creeks, in the footsteps of their ancestors.
The Northern Neck National Heritage Area acknowledges the more than 10,000-year past and continued presence of the people who called, and still call Tsenacomoco and its waters home. As the Indigenous people of Virginia work to continue their traditional cultural practices, maintain their connections to the landscape, and uphold their sovereignty, the Northern Neck National Heritage Area affirms its support in their endeavors.