The Sixteen Twenty-Two Uprising: Resistance or Massacre Depends on Who's Writing

March twenty-second, sixteen twenty-two. The English accounts say it came without warning. Contemporary scholars of the Powhatan Confederacy say that is exactly how a carefully coordinated strategic operation is supposed to look from the outside.

On that morning, warriors of the Powhatan Confederacy carried out synchronized attacks on English settlements along a stretch of the James River. They killed approximately three hundred and forty-seven colonists, close to one-quarter of the entire English population in Virginia. Opechancanough, the brother and successor of Wahunsenacawh, had been planning the operation for months. Fifteen years of English encroachment had strained and finally broken the relationship. The confederacy understood that trading and negotiating had not stopped the expansion. The coordinated attack was the instrument the English had left available.

The English called it a massacre. The word carries a specific connotation: an atrocity committed against civilians by savages. The Powhatan term for the event is not recorded in the surviving documents, because the surviving documents were all written by English survivors. A second reading, drawn from the logic of the confederacy's own situation, is that this was an act of strategic military resistance: a coordinated effort, precisely timed, aimed at a colonial occupation that had taken land, disrupted trade networks, and imposed political control by force. The result would have been the same regardless of the word used. Three hundred and forty-seven people died in a morning.

The English Crown used the attack as justification to revoke the Virginia Company's charter, converting Virginia into a royal colony with a direct military mandate. The retaliatory campaigns that followed killed people across the region for years. They also established the policy template that English and later American colonialism would apply across the continent for the next two centuries: treat armed Indigenous resistance as proof of savagery requiring total pacification, rather than as a political response to dispossession.

The word on the historical markers here says massacre. The Powhatan read is available now in scholarship. The listener can hold both.