The Ancient Homeland

Our story begins in the Ohio Valley, long before colonial records named us. The great earthworks of the Adena and Hopewell cultures — Serpent Mound, the Newark ceremonial complex, and the mounds that follow the stars — reflect the deep roots of our ancestors. These places were not mysteries to our people but expressions of a worldview shaped by earth, river, and sky.

Our worldview remembers Turtle Island rising from the water, Sky Woman falling from above, and the Sky Road — the Milky Way — as the trail of souls. These beliefs mirror the alignment of Ohio’s ancient earthworks with lunar standstills and solstice points. For our ancestors, the land and the sky were a unified ceremonial world.

The Scioto, Muskingum, and Great Miami rivers shaped our earliest movements. Families hunted, traded, and held ceremony along these waterways. From this homeland, some bands later traveled east into the Piedmont, carrying their stories and responsibilities with them — but the Ohio Valley remained our first remembered home.

Centuries ago, Eastern Siouan–speaking families traveled from the Ohio Valley into the Virginia and Carolina Piedmont, establishing towns along the Dan, Eno, Roanoke, and Staunton rivers. These were strong communities: palisaded villages, agricultural fields, and council plazas now known as the Piedmont Village Tradition.

Here in the Piedmont, our ancestors lived among relatives called Saponi, Tutelo, Occaneechi, Cheraw, and Catawba. Though Europeans treated these as separate tribes, they were variations within a single Eastern Siouan world — bound by shared ancestry, ceremony, and dialect.

The Occaneechi Trading Path connected our towns to the Chesapeake in the north and the Catawba lands in the south. Saponi messengers and traders walked this route long before colonists followed it. These trails held families together and helped the people survive in a world changing faster than ever.

 Pressures from the North

The 1600s brought conflict as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) expanded southward during the Beaver Wars. Eastern Siouan towns — including the Saponi — found themselves on the front line of this struggle.

At the Treaty of Albany in 1722, the Haudenosaunee openly admitted that the Saponi and Tutelo were one of the few nations they feared. They described their relationship with the Saponi (whom they called by a different name which some historians believe to have been the origin of the name 'Tutelo') as:

 "the Toderechrones against whom we have had so inveterate an enmity, that we thought it impossible it could be extinguished, but by a total Extirpation of them, yet since you desire it we are willing to receive them into this Peace & to forgive all that is past."

Families moved for safety, joining allied nations or relocating village sites. Some made temporary alliances with English forts; others maintained independence. Through every shift, the people carried the memory of their Ohio homeland and a determination to protect their children. 

A New Threat: The Colony of Virginia

As English settlement pushed west, Saponi families faced new dangers. Bacon’s Rebellion devastated allied tribes, and colonial policies tightened around Indigenous movement, trade, and autonomy. The Saponi adapted, moved strategically, and sought temporary alliances for survival. 

Before being forced to consolidate at Fort Christanna, our ancestors lived in several Eastern Siouan towns, not one isolated “Saponi settlement.” These towns included Monasukapanough, a Monacan-Saponi Siouan center; Sapona Town near modern day Windsor, NC, Junktapurse, a river town mentioned in colonial accounts; communities along the Eno, Dan, and Haw rivers; and villages near Occaneechi Island and the Trading Path. Each of these places held families who shared language, ceremony, and kinship — a network of related Siouan peoples living across the Piedmont. 

Fort Christanna began as a negotiated refuge, bringing the Saponi, Tutelo, Occaneechi, and other Siouan peoples together under a fragile agreement with the Colony of Virginia. But the fort’s promise eroded over time. The House of Burgesses refused to continue funding its operation, violating the treaty obligations that had drawn our people there. Tensions grew as the mission school pushed cultural assimilation, colonial traders encroached on surrounding lands, and the people lost confidence in the fort’s ability to protect them. One of the breaking points came when Seneca raiders murdered visiting Catawba warriors right at the gates, exposing the fort’s failure to provide the security it promised. By 1750, Fort Christanna was fully abandoned, and our families dispersed in many directions seeking new alliances and safer ground. 

Many Roads Out of Christanna

After the fall of Christanna, Saponi and Tutelo families traveled in every direction: north toward Pennsylvania and Blackfoot Town near present day Dagsboro, Deleware, east into the Carolinas, west along the frontier, and south toward the Catawba. Each move carried fragments of language, stories, and ceremonial memory. 

In Pennsylvania, some Saponi lived at Shamokin, a multi-tribal community that included Lenape, Shawnee, Nanticoke, and other displaced peoples. This period forged alliances that echo in the genealogies and oral histories of their descendants. 

One of the most significant migrations led to the formal adoption of the Tutelo–Saponi by the Cayuga Nation of the Haudenosaunee at the Great Council Fire of 1753. The adoption rite bound our ancestors to the Cayuga line and preserved elements of Saponi language and ceremonial life well into the modern era.  This adoption saw the Saponi migrate to places like Coreorgonel, Diahoga, Skogiri and eventually to Ontario.

The Hopeful Migration

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, after the fall of Shamokin, Coreorgonel, and the Treaty of Greenville,  Saponi-descended families traveled back into the Ohio Valley, returning to lands tied to their oldest stories. some scholars termed this return as The Hopeful Migration, Saponi groups moving to the newely designated "Indian Country" of the Ohio River Valley — a movement carried by intertribal networks, frontier alliances, and the promise of new beginnings after the American Revolution. 

These returning families established communities in southern and central Ohio. Their presence appears in early county records, marriage networks, family lines, and oral traditions that maintained memories of Saponi, Tutelo, and Catawba ancestry. 

With this return, the people closed a circle that stretched from ancient Ohio to the Piedmont, through diaspora and adoption, and back again. Across centuries of upheaval, the people survived by carrying identity inward — in stories, in crafts, in relationships, and in responsibility to one another.

Survival Through Silence

Through the 1800s and 1900s, many Saponi-descended families survived by staying quiet about their ancestry in a society that punished Indigenous identity. Census takers often erased Native status with labels like “free colored” or “mulatto,” but families kept the truth alive in their own way — in kinship networks, stories, and traditional arts. 

Today, Saponi identity lives in several communities across North America — including the Haliwa-Saponi, Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Catawba Indian Nation, Tutelo descendants in Six Nations Reserve, and the Saponi–Catawba Nation of the Ohio Valley. Each carries a different part of the story, but all reflect a shared Eastern Siouan ancestry. 

The Saponi–Catawba Nation of the Ohio Valley now works to revive language, preserve history, strengthen community, and reclaim traditions after centuries of displacement. Our survival is not a relic of the past — it is the lived experience of our people today.