Saponi Erotic

The Saponi were a Siouan people living where most of their neighbors spoke other languages. Algonquian languages were spoken along the Virginia coast. The Tuscarora, Nottoway and Meherrin to the east and the Cherokee in the mountains spoke Iroquoian ones. Between them, the Saponi held the Piedmont with the closely allied Tutelo and Occaneechi. Their language is usually treated as a dialect of Tutelo, part of the small Ohio Valley branch of the Siouan family. Their history keeps returning to two things: that separate language, and a long habit of moving, merging and regrouping with those same allies.

English explorers pushing west from Virginia met them in the early 1670s, and in 1701 John Lawson found a Saponi town on the Yadkin River in North Carolina. Colonial expansion and Iroquois war parties pushed them back toward the Virginia frontier. In 1714 Governor Alexander Spotswood built Fort Christanna on the Meherrin River to serve the Saponi and several related bands as a trading post, a buffer settlement and a school. The experiment lasted only a few years. In 1728 a Saponi hunter named Ned Bearskin hunted for William Byrd II's boundary survey party. He described his people's beliefs about the afterlife, and Byrd wrote them down, giving one of the few firsthand looks at Saponi religion.

After that the people split. In the 1740s many moved north into Pennsylvania and New York, where the Tutelo were formally adopted by the Cayuga, and after the American Revolution those families settled at Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario. Much of what survives of the language was recorded from Tutelo speakers there in the nineteenth century. Other families never left the Carolina and Virginia borderlands. Through the segregation era they held together around kinship, churches and schools of their own, often against officials who wanted to sort everyone into a two-race system.

Today those descendants make up three tribes recognized by North Carolina. The Haliwa-Saponi of Halifax and Warren counties take their name from the two counties and hold a long-running spring powwow in Hollister. The Sappony live in the High Plains settlement, which straddles the state line between Person County, North Carolina and Halifax County, Virginia. The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation is centered in Alamance County. None of the three has federal recognition. For all of them, Saponi is a working identity, not a historical footnote. It lives on through tribal councils, youth programs and dance regalia, and through a stubborn insistence on being counted.