The Monacan Indian Nation is one of eleven Native American tribes recognized since the late 20th century by the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia.

[1] The Monacan nation was first recorded by Jamestown settlers in colonial Virginia, as living west and upland of the Tidewater area.

One of their former villages, upriver of the falls of the James River was abandoned by the 18th century and the land granted to Huguenot settlers, who retained the name of Manakin town.

The Monacan were hostile competitors with the Powhatan confederacy, a group of 30 Algonquian-speaking tribes who controlled much of the Tidewater and coastal plain.

On a 40-mile (64 km) march upstream along the banks of the James River, the settlers found two Monacan towns, whose names they recorded as Massinacak and Mowhemenchough.

[citation needed] In 1656 several hundred Nahyssan, Mahock, and Rechahecrians (possibly Iroquoian-speaking Erie from present-day Pennsylvania) threatened both the Powhatan tribes and the settlers by camping near the James falls.

The Monacan towns of Mowhemencho and Mahock were still occupied in 1670, when John Lederer and Major Harris recorded visiting them; they found that the men possessed muskets.

Lederer recorded their tradition that they had settled in the area on account of an oracle 400 years earlier, having been driven from the northwest by an enemy nation.

The Virginian House of Burgesses granted much of the former site of Mowhemencho to French Huguenot refugees, who were settled on both sides of the James River in 1700 and 1701.

Although a few Monacan lingered in the area as late as 1702, the core remnant seems to have merged with the Nahyssan and other closely related Virginia Siouan tribes, by then known generally as Tutelo-Saponi.

Between 1831 and 1833, William Johns, an ancestor of some of today's Monacan, purchased 452 acres (1.83 km2) of land on Bear Mountain for a settlement of families related to him.

This program ignored how people identified socially and culturally, and disrupted decades of records, causing American Indians in Virginia to lose historical continuity.

In 1926 Mongrel Virginians: The WIN Tribe, a study of a mixed-race group in the Blue Ridge Mountains, was published by the Carnegie Institution.

Some contemporary academic reviewers strongly criticized and ridiculed the book and its reliance on community anecdotes to make judgments about families and individuals.

[10] When ancestors of current Monacan families entered the U.S. military to serve in the world wars, they resisted accepting the classification of "colored", which the state of Virginia had tried impose on them.

[9] In 1946 the researcher William Harlan Gilbert Jr. described the Monacan in his "Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Racial Islands of the Eastern United States".

In the early 1980s, Peter Houck, a local physician, published Indian Island in Amherst County, in which he speculated that the free people of color in the region during the antebellum era were in part descendants of the Monacan tribe.

Prior to Houck's book, most people claiming Native American ancestry in that vicinity had identified as Cherokee, which were well-known in the Southeast.

[15] Complicating matters, one of the subgroups of the Algonquian-speaking Pocomoke people who lived on what is now known as the Eastern Shore of Maryland, was sometimes called the Manonoakin or Manakin tribe.

A model of an ancient Monacan village has been constructed as part of Natural Bridge (Virginia) State Park, in nearby Rockbridge County.