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Transcription: [00:13:18]

{SPEAKER name="Helen Rountree"}
the fishing will be wonderful at times, and some of these things will come into the freshwater marsh area, but the part of freshwater marsh that the Indians appear to have homed in on the most, if you can believe John Smith, is the edible plants.
[00:13:32]
And that applies to freshwater marsh, and also to the swamps. And most of these tributaries of the rivers, if you're far enough upriver, will have a freshwater swamp at the head of them. So swamps and freshwater marsh, both, were important auxiliary areas for Indian folks who wanted to go gathering plants.
[00:13:51]

There's one particularly important plant that John Smiths mentions by name that grows in such areas and that's tuckahoe, Peltandra virginica, which is arrow arum. Tuckahoe was used at the very end of the spring and the beginning of the summer when the winter corn supplies had run out and people were beginning to have a real hard time making it.
[00:14:12]

And they would go into these marshes and they would gather the roots of tuckahoe. They would have to leach out the tannic acid in them, and then they could make what he called 'a passable bread'. (I've got to get to work to try some of this stuff. Haven't tried it yet.)
[00:14:26]

Alright. This is a hard season food, and as such it became very important. It was something that could be gathered when other things had not yet come right, like corn and like some kind of berries. It was a hard time food.
[00:14:40]

It was also edible, I understand, though not at its best, year round. So if you're having a hard time, if the English come and zap you in the fall right after your harvest and take all your corn away, if you still know where there's enough arrow arum, you can make it.
[00:14:53]

So, people kept track of where there was a really good stand of tuckahoe. Curtenemmons is what it appears as later in the century. And people would specifically keep up their treaty rights in order to be able to gather Curtenemmons which means 'arrow arum', at various seasons, even if the land was claimed by Englishmen.
[00:15:13]
Treaty rights like that kept Indian culture alive an extra length of time, and I'll come back to that when I talk about late villages. It's one of the things that did keep traditional culture
[00:15:21]