The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

during the council that decided on his death—a decision that
Pocahontas, daughter of one of the sachems, overturned. 10 The
Wampanoag Confederacy’s loss of control over the Chesapeake
Bay area did not cause an end to the rule of sunksquaws or of the
empress: George Fox, founder of the Quaker religion, recorded
that “the old Empress [of Accomack] … sat in council” when he
was visiting in March 1673. 11 In 1705, Robert Beverley
mentioned two towns governed by queens: Pungoteque and
Nanduye. Pungoteque, he said, was a small Nation, even though
governed by a Queen, and he listed Nanduye as “a seat of the
Empress.” He seemed impressed. For while Nanduye was a
small settlement of “not above 20 families,” the old Empress had
“all the Nations of this shore under Tribute.” 12
From before 1620 until her death in 1617, a squaw-sachem
known as the “Massachusetts Queen” by the Virginia colonizers
governed the Massachusetts Confederacy. 13 It was her fortune to
preside over the Confederacy’s destruction as the people were
decimated by disease, war, and colonial manipulations. Magnus,
the Narragansett sunksquaw whose name was recorded by
whites, is mentioned above. Others include the Pocasset
sunksquaw Weetamoo, who was King Philip’s ally and “served
as war chief commanding over 300 warriors” during his war
with the British. 14 Queen Weetamoo was given the white woman
Mary Rowlandson, who wrote descriptions of the sunksquaw in
her captivity narrative.
Awashonks, another queen in the Mid-Atlantic region, was
squaw-sachem of the Sakonnet, a tribe allied with the
Wampanoag Confederacy. She reigned in the latter part of the
seventeenth century. After fighting for a time against the British
during King Philip’s War, she was forced to surrender. Because
she then convinced her warriors to fight with the British, she
was able to save them from enslavement in the West Indies. 15
The last sunksquaw Grumet mentions was named