[3] At the time of European encounter, the Piscataway was one of the most populous and powerful Native polities of the Chesapeake Bay region, with a territory on the north side of the Potomac River.
By the early seventeenth century, the Piscataway had come to exercise hegemony over other Algonquian-speaking Native American groups on the north bank of the river.
The Piscataway nation declined dramatically before the nineteenth century, under the influence of colonization, infectious disease, and intertribal and colonial warfare.
While Indigenous peoples inhabited areas along the waterways of Maryland for thousands of years, the historic Piscataway coalesced as a tribe comprising numerous settlements sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
The women were developed agriculturalists, growing varieties of maize, beans and squash that supported population and a hierarchical society.
By the end of the sixteenth century, each werowance on the north bank of the Potomac was subject to a single paramount chief: the ruler of the Piscataway, known as the Tayac.
Soon, the tribe was caught in English religious wars, as the Virginia Protestant trader William Claiborne and his ally Captain Ingalls, invaded Maryland and destroyed St. Mary's City as well as the rival trading post at Kent Island.
Since neither the tribe nor the rival Maryland governments recognized Brent's claim to Piscataway lands, the couple crossed the Potomac to establish a trading post and live at Aquia Creek, Virginia.
Moreover, as the English persisted and eventually developed a more successful colony after resolving their own religious disputes, they turned against the Piscataway, competing for land and resources.
By a 1668 treaty, western shore Algonquians agreed to be confined to two reservations: one on the Wicomico River; the other, on those settlements that comprised a portion of the Piscataway homeland.
However, those reservations had not been laid out when Susquehannocks retreating from the Virginia Colony established a fort in Maryland, and the war they had been waging against English colonists flared into Bacon's Rebellion.
Refugees from dispossessed Algonquian nations, including the Mattaponi (who had their own small reservation in Virginia), joined with the Piscataway, who by 1690 had retreated into Zekiah Swamp.
[8] In the eighteenth century, some Piscataway, as well as Lenape and other fleeing Algonquian groups, migrated northwest toward the Susquehanna River seeking relief from the European settlers.
Furthermore, the prevailing racial attitudes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became Jim Crow policies of the twentieth century—based on a binary society.
He influenced the Piscataway, but also other remnant southeastern American Indian communities, such as the Lumbee of North Carolina, and the Nanticoke, and Powhatan of Virginia and Maryland.