Students will research one of the seven federally recognized tribes of Native Americans in Virginia to identify local features of the land, their language, the region of Virginia where they originally lived, where the tribal lands are today, and how they interacted with their environment. From this research, the student groups will design a visualization of this data using a poster, online design tool, or a presentation. Student groups will present their information to each other, and the classroom will design a chart to find similarities and differences between the tribes.

1. Have the students bring a Math graphing problem that they have been working on in class.  **This will take some coordination with their homeroom teacher in order to work! or present a simple graphing problem for them to solve.  It needs to have 3-4 variables. This is so that they can use 3-4 coordinating colors of yarn for their design.In this lesson, we will translate the bar graph chart into a horizontal graph design.  Use the numbers to represent rows of weaving. For example, if a 5 is represented in the information then color in a section of rows on the graph paper to represent 5 rows that will be woven in that color. Tell the students to use the same colors that they have on their math bar graph, when creating their graph for weaving so that there is less confusion. 

A collection of resources for lesson planning and learning more about Native Americans, past and present. This resource was created through a partnership between CodeVA and the Virginia Tribal Education Consortium (VTEC). 

In 1607, a party of Englishmen landed in a place they called Virginia. They followed in the footsteps of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had visited Virginia (which, at the time, included North Carolina) with a party of settlers in 1585. The colony founded by Raleigh’s party failed, weakened by lack of supplies and irregular contact with England.

To the people who already lived in the area, this was the land of the Powhatan Confederacy, a vast regional network of allied communities living under the leadership of Wahunsenacah (also known as Powhatan). Contact between the English and the people of the Powhatan confederacy was fraught with misunderstanding and conflict. This owed a great deal to the fact that the English were in the Americas to form a colony and make money for the Virginia Company of London, the corporation that had launched them on their voyage west. The Powhatan, on the other hand, lived out their values of kinship, allyship, and reciprocity in a way that was at first incomprehensible to the English, and that later they firmly rejected.