Don Luis

Who was Don Luis?

Don Luís de Velasco, also known as Paquiquino, was a Native American, possibly of the Kiskiack or Paspahegh tribe, from Tidewater Virginia who in 1561 was taken by the Spanish to Cuba, Mexico, and Spain, where he was baptized as Don Luís de Velasco and educated. Don Luís would return in 1571 as a missionary to Virginia, where he apparently participated in the killing of the Jesuits who had accompanied him.

Some historians, among them Carl Bridenbaugh, have speculated that Don Luís was the same person as Opechancanough, younger brother of Powhatan, paramount chief of an alliance of Algonquian-speakers in the Tidewater. Opechancanough himself became paramount chief and led two famous attacks on Jamestown settlers, one in 1622 and another in 1644. The Virginia anthropologist Helen C. Rountree has suggested this is unlikely to be true, arguing that the Virginia Indians may have claimed otherwise "in an attempt to disavow their association with Opechancanough, whose memory was still so detested by the English due to the attack of 1622."