The Machapunga were a small Algonquian language–speaking Native American tribe from coastal northeastern North Carolina.Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America, 81. They were part of the Secotan people.
Machpunga is also the name of an early 16th-century village on the Potomac River and of an 18th-century Powhatan Confederacy village in Northampton County, Virginia.Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, p. 781.
In 1700 and 1701, the Machapunga maintained a village named Mattamuskeet.Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, p. 822. It held 30 warriors and was likely located on the shore of Mattamuskeet Lake in present-day Hyde County.
In 1711 they participated in the Tuscarora War against the colonists.Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, p. 349. By 1715, the English colonists assigned a tract of land on Mattamuskeet Lake to the surviving Machapunga and Coree, who lived in a single village. The Coree soon left and joined the Tuscaroras.
From 1718 to 1746, John Squires emerged as a leader on the tract, or Mattamuskeet reservation. John Mackey and Long Tom served as his advisors. His son Charles Squires followed him as a leader; however, his influence declined from 1752 to 1760. A deed to the Mattamuskeet reservation was signed by six Machapunga men in 1761. Even before 1727, Machapunga residents began selling their land until 1761, which the land had all been sold.
Scattered Machapunga families still resided in North Carolina in 1761. Then missionary Rev. Alexander Stewart founded a school for eight Native children and two African-American children. Roanoke and Hatteras people moved into the area. Stewart wrote that he had baptized seven "Attamuskeet, Hatteras, and Roanoke" adults and children. In 1763, he baptized 21 more Native people from that region.
The Machapunga ultimately became extinct as a tribe in the 18th century. "After the expulsion of the Tuscarora from North Carolina the coast tribes seem to have faded from history and, so far as I can find, we have no definite mention of them in the nineteenth century," wrote anthropologist Frank Speck. "Sporadic references to Indians persisted in the Hyde County records until the early nineteeth century," wrote archaeologist Patrick H. Garrow in 1975.
An unrecognized organization, alternately known as the Machapunga Tribe of North Carolina or the Machapunga-Mattamuskeet Indians of North Carolina, represents individuals who state they are of Machapunga descent. They are not state-recognized or federally recognized as a Native American tribe.
History
16th century
17th century
18th century
Descendants
Notes
External links
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