The Nacotchtank: Anacostia's Erased Name-Givers

The river running through southeast Washington has been called the Anacostia for so long that the name feels like geography, like a fact of the landscape. It is not. It is the anglicized remnant of a people's name for themselves.

The Nacotchtank, sometimes spelled Nacostine, were an Algonquian-speaking nation whose principal village stood near the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers when English colonists arrived in the early sixteen hundreds. They lived in a network of settlements along what the English called the Eastern Branch of the Potomac. They traded, fished, and farmed this land for generations before any European recorded their existence.

By the sixteen seventies, they were gone from the region. Pressure from colonial settlement, epidemic disease, and conflict with the Susquehannock nation had fragmented and dispersed the Nacotchtank within a few decades of first contact. No federally recognized tribal government descends from them today. No oral history tradition survives. What is known about the Nacotchtank comes almost entirely from the accounts of the colonists who displaced them.

The land the city of Washington was built on is, more broadly, Piscataway land. The Piscataway Conoy Tribe received state recognition from Maryland in two thousand twelve, after more than a century of pursuing it; it does not have federal recognition. The DC History Center and the National Park Service have some interpretive materials on the Nacotchtank, though the sources available are almost all colonial documentation of a people who did not leave their own written record.

The river named for them flows past the Frederick Douglass house, past Anacostia, past the yards where the Navy has kept ships for over a century. The name survives. What it represents does not.