BRADEN ROBERTS
Staff Writer
UMW is not taking enough action to publicize Native American history, culture and diversity, despite being built on Native American land and having a hall named after the Seacobecks, who were a Native American group that lived in the Fredericksburg area before European settlers colonized it. The few ways that UMW offers information about the Seacobecks are not well-advertised to the student body.
UMW has a responsibility to teach students and staff about the origins of Seacobeck Hall’s name, as many do not know about the Seacobeck village. Providing a more robust detailing of the tribe’s history and culture, as well as spreading awareness of that information, is necessary for the University to continue using the name.
Another difficulty in using the Seacobeck name is that it may not be what the Indigenous Peoples referred to themselves as.
“Basically, Secobeck was the name of a town, probably inhabited by people of the Cuttatawomen nation,” said history and American studies professor Jason Sellers. “In working with the present-day Rappahannock tribe recently, we’ve preferred to describe many of these peoples living along the Rappahannock River as ‘Algonquian-speaking communities.’ That reflects their common linguistic and cultural backgrounds.”
Since the Seacobeck community no longer exists, it is impossible to fully know the truth of their name, especially due to how their name was first recorded.
“John Smith would have been the first to map them and record the name for European audiences,” said Sellers. “It’s possible he misunderstood what he was being told—maybe the word described where they lived but wasn’t a name, for instance. But given its similarity to other place names, that it’s clearly an Algonquian word and that Smith was pretty accurately recording a lot of this sort of information, that’s probably what they called themselves.”