Mapping is a fraught exercise for Indigenous communities. Historically, maps have operated as a tool of colonial oppression — a means of codifying into law state-sanctioned locations, boundaries, rights, and natures of both geographic and human landscapes. However, increasingly, Indigenous communities are seizing upon the opportunities presented by geographic data to create dynamic, robust, and culturally-centered maps that provide a powerful counter-narrative to colonial assumptions and traditions.
In some cases, such mapping seeks to embed personal stories, narratives, images, and impressions within a two-dimensional representation of a geographic space — thereby enriching and elevating it to make texture out of flatness. In other cases, mapping may seek to entirely subvert western concepts of maps — such that poetry, song, or visual art becomes the map itself, representing meaning and experience over time in place. In still other cases, the simple act of mapping is a counter-assertion to paper genocide or other examples of historical erasure; in such cases, the very act of forcing an acknowledgement of presence through mapping serves to affirm the failure of the colonial state to fully erase or fully oppress.
Such is the case with the map presented here, a rough outline of the migration history of the Ohio Saponi — Eastern Siouans who embarked on a Hopeful Migration from the Saponi homelands in North Carolina & Virginia to seek the promise of a safe land for Indians and free people of color in the Midwest.
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A Brief History of the Ohio Saponi
The Saponi are an Eastern Siouan (Yesàh) people with origins in the Great Lakes Region. Since a time before memory, Yesàh peoples have held and occupied a vast territory along the Appalachian foothills, ranging from the Ohio & Kanawha River Valleys to southernmost bounds of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Piedmont Plateau.
Present within the Mississippi Shatter Zone, the Saponi were deeply impacted by the depopulation events that followed Contact in the 1500s, and became central to the shifting political landscape of the Indigenous East Coast from that time through the 1700s, at which time the effects of the Indian Wars of the Southern British Colonies, including the Tuscarora War (1711-1715), the Yamasee War (1715-1717), and later Pontiac’s War (1763-1766), Lord Dunmore’s War (1774) and eventually the American Revolution (1775-1783) collectively formed another shatter event, scattering Native communities across the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes regions.
Although the 1800s began to see the resettling of Saponi communities and their kin-linked tribes, two further migrations of Saponi people took place: first, the Hopeful Migration of 1805 – 1865, when Saponi families from North Carolina and Virginia migrated en masse to the Ohio Country – the region which would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan (collectively, these migrants are referred to as “the Ohio Saponi”); and second, the Necessary Migration of post-WWII economic shifts that drove many southeastern Indigenous families to migrate to cities such as Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and others in pursuit of employment and improved quality of life.
What follows here is not a comprehensive mapping of the history of the Ohio Saponi, but rather an illustrated timeline, intended to provide a temporal and geographic overview of the community’s evolution through the tumultuous period following European Contact.
(Counter) Mapping the Ohio Saponi Migration: https://arcg.is/0W4qby