08/19/2026
In 1610, an Indigenous woman named Opossunoquonuske invited a group of English colonists to a feast. Thirteen of them would not return alive.
Opossunoquonuske was a werowansqua, or female leader, associated with the Appomattoc people of the Powhatan political world in Virginia. English records called her the "Queen of Appomattoc." At a time when the struggling Jamestown colony was increasingly locked in conflict with neighboring Native communities, she appears in the colonial record under extraordinary circumstances.
According to English accounts, Opossunoquonuske persuaded a party of settlers to come ashore and dine with her people. The English later claimed she accomplished this through "feminine guile," language that reveals as much about English attitudes toward powerful women as it does about the encounter itself.
The colonists were reportedly convinced to leave their weapons behind in their boat.
Once they were separated from their arms, the invitation revealed itself as a trap. Opossunoquonuske's warriors attacked. Of the fourteen Englishmen in the party, thirteen were killed. One man escaped.
The episode was not an isolated act of violence. It unfolded during a period of worsening warfare between the English settlement at Jamestown and the peoples of the Powhatan paramount chiefdom. English expansion, demands for food, raids and retaliatory attacks were already transforming the region into a battlefield.
Opossunoquonuske's victory was also followed by retaliation. English forces later attacked her community, and colonial accounts report that she was killed.
She survives in the written record largely because her enemies wrote about her. Even there, behind the dismissive language about "feminine guile," is evidence of something the colonists clearly understood: Opossunoquonuske possessed political authority, commanded warriors and was capable of turning English assumptions about her to deadly advantage.
