Haliwa - Saponi Tribal Seal.
The Sappony or Saponi are Native American tribe historically based in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia. They spoke the Siouan Tutelo-Saponi language, related to the languages of the Tutelo, Occaneechi, Monacan, Manahoac and other eastern Siouan peoples. Reduced by disease and warfare, surviving members of the tribe migrated north to merge with other tribes. They disappeared from the historic record as a tribe by the end of the 18th century and were considered extinct as a tribe.
Since the late 20th century, certain groups in the Southeast have organized to assert their American Indian cultural identity; some claim descent from the historic Sappony. Among these are the Haliwa-Saponi, and the Occaneechi Band of the Sappony Nation of North Carolina, who took names referring to the historic tribe; and the Indians of Person County. Other Sappony bands are located in Ohio, Georgia and Texas.
None of these tribes has gained federal recognition. Federal tribal recognition grants to tribes the right to certain benefits, and requires documentation as regulated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) (with consultation by federally recognized tribes).
Early 20th-century anthropologist John R. Swanton agreed with James Mooney, Hale, Bushnell and other scholars that the Sappony were probably the same as the Monasuccapanough, a Virginia people mentioned in 1608 by John Smith as tributary to the Monacan. Their main village as described then is believed to have been in the vicinity of present-day Charlottesville, Virginia.
The first known contact between a European explorer and the Sappony was in 1670, when John Lederer found their village on the Staunton River at Otter Creek, southwest of present-day Lynchburg, Virginia. In 1671 Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam led an expedition that passed through the same village, as well as a second in Long Island in the Stauton River between present-day Campbell County, Virginia. Here settlers during Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 attacked the friendly Sappony, as well as the closely related Occaneechi, without justification. The colonists were retaliating for raids conducted by the unrelated Doeg tribe.
Nearly decimated, the Sappony relocated to three islands at the confluence of the Dan and Staunton rivers in Clarksville with their allies, the Occaneechi, Tutelo, and Nahyssans.
By 1701, the Sappony and allied tribes, often collectively referred to as "Saponi" or "Tutelo," had begun moving to the location of present-day Salisbury, North Carolina to gain distance from the colonial frontier. By 1711 they were just east of the Roanoke River and west of modern Windsor, North Carolina. In 1714, Governor Spotswood resettled them around Fort Christanna in Virginia.The tribes agreed to this for protection from hostile tribes. Although in 1718 the House of Burgesses voted to abandon the fort and school, the Siouan tribes continued to stay in that area for some time. They gradually moved away in small groups over the years 1730–1750. One record from 1728 indicated that Colonel William Byrd II made a survey of the border between Virginia and North Carolina, guided by Ned Bearskin, a Sappony hunter. Byrd noted several abandoned fields of corn, indicating serious disturbance among the local tribes.
In 1740, the majority of the Saponi and Tutelo moved to Shamokin, Pennsylvania. They surrendered to the Iroquois and joined the latter in New York. They were formally adopted by the Cayuga Nation in 1753.
Smaller bands were noted in Pennsylvania as late as 1778. Some were still in North Carolina much later. Since most of the Iroquois sided with the British in the American Revolutionary War, after the victory by the United States, the Sappony and Tutelo who had joined the Iroquois were forced with them into exile in Canada. After that point, recorded history was silent about the tribe.
Like other Native Americans in interaction with other peoples, the Sappony intermarried. In some of the early Spanish and Portuguese colonies, mulatto meant mixed-race African and Native American, but under the English tradition, it came to mean persons of European and African ancestry. Because of slavery society, some whites in slave state areas tended to classify anyone of visible African ancestry as African, even mixed-race people who identified and lived culturally as Native American. But in other parts of the South, race was considered a more fluid concept, with mixed-race people being classified as "white", "Indian", "negro", "mulatto", or sometimes even "Mexican", as the situation suited them.
In Maryland, the Catholic Church kept records that recognized its Indian parishioners identifying as Native American; these have helped some descendants prove continuity of communities.
Because South Carolina taxed American Indian slaves at a lesser rate than African slaves as early as 1719, that colony had legislated that "all such slaves as are not entirely Indian shall be accounted as negro." After the legal decision in Hudgins v. Wright in 1808, Virginia tended to classify persons of mixed Native American and African ancestry as 'Negroes', a decision that favored slaveholders after Indian slavery was ended.
Colonial and early United States governments generally failed to recognize how people identified culturally. The problem grew more severe at the turn of the 19th century, resulting in records that are biased toward classifying all free people of color as African American, when some identified culturally and by descent as members of specific Native American tribes. There have been many academic disagreements about the cultural identity of numerous people recorded simply as free blacks or free people of color.
Jack Forbes has noted that the terms "mustees" and "mulattoes" at one time referred to persons of part American [Indian] ancestry. A mustee may have been primarily part-African and American [Indian], and a mulatto was usually part-European and American [Indian], but the latter term particularly was used more generally to refer to mixed-race people of African American and European ancestry. At the time, the federal censuses had no classification for American Indian, and did not ask people with which culture they identified.
Paul Heinegg and Virginia DeMarce have found that a high percentage of people identified as "free blacks" or "free people of color" in federal censuses from 1790–1810 (when there was no designation for Indian) in the Upper South were descended from families classified as free African Americans in colonial Virginia. Most were free because they were descended from unions between white women (who were free) and African or African-American men. Their children and descendants maintained this free status. At the time, most working-class people shared living and working quarters. These families were documented through extensive research in colonial records of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay Colony, including court records, land deeds, wills and manumissions. Some free African Americans were descended from enslaved Africans freed by owners as early as the mid-17th century. By the early decades of the 19th century, such free families had many descendants; they often moved to frontier areas where racial strictures were reduced. In some areas, the lighter-skinned descendants formed close communities in which they called themselves or were known as Indian, Portuguese or one of a variety of terms, such as Melungeon. In some cases, descendants married more into one or another of their ancestral communities, becoming increasingly white, black or Indian.
Issues about identity became more confusing under Jim Crow in the late 19th century as white Democrats imposed racial segregation to enforce white supremacy. In in the 20th century, as both North Carolina and Virginia adopted one-drop rules as part of their racial segregation laws, requiring all individuals to be classified as either white or black (essentially, all other or all people of color). They classified as black any person with any black ancestry, regardless of how small. Walter Ashby Plecker, the Registrar of Virginia's Bureau of Vital Statistics, issued orders to field offices to change birth records of individuals whose families he had decided were trying to pass as Indian to avoid being classified as black. Due to his application of the Racial Integrity Act, records of many Native American-identified people were changed without their consent, and often without their knowledge. In later years, their descendants have had difficulty in proving their communities' continuity of identity.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappony
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Cosmic sky teachings accommodate every single stage and phase of spiritual growth as well as the evolutionary stages of life and consciousness simultaneously on all world systems.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2016-2017.
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