The Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe is a state-recognized tribe in North Carolina. The tribe is headquartered in Hollister, North Carolina. It is not included on the list of federally recognized tribes maintained by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Formerly named the Haliwarnash Croatan Indian Club, and before that the Essex Indian Club, they adopted their current form of government in 1953 and were recognized in 1965 by the state of North Carolina. The tribe has created schools and other institutions to preserve its culture and identity, from which members construed as Black were excluded. They primarily belong to Protestant Christian churches, mostly Baptist and Methodist.
Name The neologism Haliwa is a portmanteau of the Halifax and Warren counties. The tribe appended the term Saponi in 1979 to reflect the Indigenous people who had lived in the area they resided in, a method common among Southeastern groups. "Groups in the Southeast generally derived their names from two sources: local geographic place-names and names of historic tribes indigenous to their homelands. Some combined the two trends. In North Carolina the modern Haliwa-Saponi Tribe took their name by combining the names of the two counties where they lived, Halifax and Warren, while attaching the name of a tribe indigenous to the area."
Government The Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe is governed by an 11-member council elected to three-year staggered terms by the members of the tribe. These include an elected chief and vice-chief.Haliwa-Saponi Tribe Website The tribe is headquartered in the Chief W.R. Richardson Tribal Government Complex in Hollister.
History The Haliwa-Saponi claim descent from the Tuscarora, Accomac, Cherokee, Occaneechi, Tutelo, Nansemond, and Saponi. Genealogical research by Paul Heinegg documents them descending instead from free African-American families originating in Virginia, similarly to the Brass Ankles, Carmelites, Melungeons, and Lumbee. Scholars termed the group a racial isolate, and some locals previously had colloquially called them Brass Ankles. Proposed state recognition legislation described the tribe as descending from the Saponi, Nansemond, and related Native groups of the region.https://www.ncleg.gov/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/PDF/BySection/Chapter_71A/GS_71A-5.pdf
18th century Decline of Indian trade Vice Chief of the Haliwa-Saponi Marvin Richardson, and consultant for non-federally recognized tribes C. S. Everett state historical documentation shows the modern Haliwa-Saponi tribe as descending from a group that arose during the 1730s, as the Indian trade declined.Multiple sources: Paul Heinegg states genealogical analysis indicates the families who later made up the Haliwa-Saponi were lighter-skinned descendants of free African-American families, mostly from Virginia. He noted they mostly descended from unions between white women and Black men, and had migrated into Northeastern North Carolina to purchase land at prices former indentured servants could afford.
The divisive Tuscarora and Yamasee wars affected colonists, Native Americans and Indian trade in Virginia and the Carolinas. The Saponi made an arrangement with the remaining band of Tuscarora in April 1733, to live with them and under their sovereignty. Richardson and Everett claim that the majority of the Saponi migrated to North Carolina with traders and planters, settling in what are now Halifax and Warren counties. They also claim that during the 1730s and 1740s, the Saponi intermarried with European colonists and free Black people, but stopped specifically after the American Revolution.
Last documentation of the Saponi In 1740, most of the remaining Saponi in Virginia moved north to Pennsylvania and New York, where they joined the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. After the American Revolutionary War and the Sullivan Expedition, they fled with the Haudenosaunee to Canada, as four of the Six Nations were allied with the British and their territories in New York State were being seized. The British government provided land and some relocation assistance to their Haudenosaunee allies. This was the last time in which the Saponi appeared in the historical record. Centuries later, a remnant of them resided in Brantford, Ontario.Henry H. Mitchell, "Rediscovering Pittsylvania's “Missing” Native Americans", The Pittsylvania Packet (Pittsylvania Historical Society, 1997, pp. 4–8, accessed 16 June 2011
Community formation From the 1730s to the 1770s, the ancestors of the modern Haliwa-Saponi tribe coalesced in "The Meadows" of southwestern Halifax County, North Carolina immediately after the American Revolution. The Meadows was later known as the largest settlement of free Black people in North Carolina. In North Carolina, the population of free African-Americans in a county generally increased with its slave population.
The 1790 United States census shows the Haliwa progenitors Benjamin and William Richardson as the heads of the only families of free non-white people in Halifax County, excluding one family of two people. William was given 640 acres of land in the county for his service as a private in the Revolutionary War. Some of the main ancestral families that settled in The Meadows were the Richardson, Copeland, Harris, Hedgepeth, and Lynch families. They were recorded as free African-American families originating in Virginia.
19th century
Over the course of the 19th century, the ancestors of the tribe maintained an endogamous community in modern Halifax, Warren, Nash, and Franklin counties and generally practiced endogamy. Having become Christian, they belonged mostly to the predominant Protestant churches: the first they established was Jeremiah Methodist Church in the mid-1870s in Halifax County. Later some of the congregation left and built the Pine Chapel Baptist Church. A later study described the Meadows as being the largest free Black settlement in 1860s North Carolina. It specifically referred to them as "old issues", meaning Black people who were free before the Civil War.
Beginning of identity assertion The first recorded assertions of Native American lineage by the ancestors of the tribe began after the end of Reconstruction, when many claimed to be Cherokee, or Tuscarora. These assertions were often challenged, and seen as vague. Richardson and Everett state they attempted to organize as a tribe from 1877 to 1920.
With the rise of Jim Crow laws in the late 19th century, the ancestors of the Haliwa-Saponi and African Americans were disfranchised by state law in 1896 and a new constitution in 1899 that was discriminatory in the application of poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses. This was the pattern for every former Confederate state, beginning with Mississippi in 1890 and proceeding through 1908. Halifax county was noted to have the most significant Black vote in North Carolina at this time.
20th century Richardson and Everett note that issues of race and ethnicity became more complex when numerous African-American laborers were recruited in 1906 for a growing timber industry and moved with their families into the Meadows area. By 1908 a few African-American families began to attend Pine Chapel Baptist Church. Some of the congregation was dismayed, and split off to form a third church, St. Paul's Baptist Church. In the 1950s, African-Americans began joining the congregation of St. Paul's, leading to some members founding the "Essex Indian Club", via which they founded a fourth church, the Mount Bethel Indian Baptist Church. The Essex Indian Club later developed into the Haliwa-Saponi tribal government.
Segregated schools
Forbidden from white schools, the community formed Bethlehem School in Warren County and the Secret Hill School in Halifax County. At this time, few official records of the period recorded any people as Native American. The schools were eventually closed by the county, and they went to school with African-Americans afterwards. Genealogist Paul Heinegg, who labels them as an "invented North Carolina Indian tribe", proposed their successful ability to attain separate schools from freedmen was a major factor in the creation of the narrative of them being Native American.
Later in the 20th century, the Indian schools closed, as desegregation guidelines forbade the use of local or state funds for racially discriminatory purposes.
Changing of birth certificates Several leaders in the 1940s, including John C. Hedgepeth, tried to have birth certificates of members indicate their community identity. In 1965, nearly four hundred people filed a successful suit which referred to them as members of the "Haliwa Indian race". They had "colored" removed from their birth certificates, drivers licenses, and marriage licenses in a judgment that indicated they did not associate with Black people socially.
Later accounts When Professor Robert K. Thomas visited with the Haliwa in the summer of 1978, he stated that many of the members referred to themselves as Cherokee. He noted they rejected the identifier of Haliwa, but that it was gaining acceptance as time went on."Cherokee Communities of the South". "Professor Robert K Thomas", Summer 1978. The same year, author Clyde Pulley published , where he discussed the Haliwa-Saponi, who he narrated he had researched for two years. In an interview, he claimed "illegitimate Indians" were obtaining millions via government programs for Native Americans, stating "We are using taxpayers' money...when other Blacks are denied money and because the money is spread so thin among these 'new tribes,' real Indians are not getting money that was appropriated for them."
Tribal organization and schism The group organized in the late 1940s under the name Haliwarnash Croatan Indian Club. They later dropped the reference to the Croatan and shortened the name to the Haliwa Indian Club, due to membership mostly being in the counties of Halifax and Warren, rather than Nash. Leader W.R. Richardson stated he dropped the "r" from "Haliwar" because Haliwa sounded similar to Chippewa, Hiawatha, and Catawba. Historians Ruth Y. Wetmore and Michael Hill wrote that the club's membership roll became the authority on Native identity, and that the collective Native identity of the group was "relatively recent".
Schism
After the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. The Board of Education (1954) that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the state undertook resistance by what was called the Pearsall Plan, which allowed municipalities to make funds available to create private neighborhood schools. A small faction of the group took advantage of this provision to build and operate a private Haliwa Indian School. However, members of their community that they considered to be Black were excluded from the school. This divided families among the group, as some did not want to adopt an anti-Black position, instead choosing cooperation with Black Americans. The two factions were from the same families, as the rival leaders were brothers in-law.
Their school operated from 1957 to 1958. Tribal members paid for supplies and materials, the building, and maintenance, much as parents do at parochial schools. The state rejected their request for grants to continue the school, and the 104-120 students were assigned to Black schools. In August of 1958, their request to be assigned to white schools was rejected. In 1957, the Haliwa Indian Tribe built the Saponi Indian Church, since renamed Mt. Bethel Indian Baptist Church, in Warren County. Other people of color, including within the community itself (newly termed ), resented their separate ethnic identity within the segregated social system.
Further developments