[2] Formerly named the Haliwarnash Indian Club,[4] they adopted their current form of government in 1953 and were recognized in 1965 by the state of North Carolina.

About 80 percent of tribal members reside within a 6-mile radius of the small unincorporated town of Hollister, in Halifax and Warren counties.

All other public schools had long been segregated as white or black (all people of color) under state law, and the Haliwa Saponi claimed a separate identity.

The Haliwa-Saponi claim descent from the Tuscarora, Nansemond, and Saponi a Siouan-speaking Native American tribe of North America's Southeastern Piedmont.

By the beginning of the century, continuous warfare with the Haudenosaunee and, especially, repeated outbreaks of infectious diseases contracted from Europeans reduced the once populous Saponi.

Joining with the Tottero, the Saponi migrated to northeastern North Carolina to be closer to the center of Virginia's colonial trade and gradually became allied with the colonists.

Most of the Tuscarora migrated from Carolina to present-day New York, where by 1722 they were adopted as the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, to whom they were related by language and culture.

They hoped these people could create a buffer between Virginia's plantation settlements, other Southeastern Siouan Piedmont Native Americans, and the Haudenosaunee from the North.

To strengthen Virginia's borders, Alexander Spotswood convinced the colonial Board of Trade to approve the establishment of Fort Christanna between the Roanoke and Meherrin rivers, about thirty-two miles north of the present-day Haliwa-Saponi powwow grounds.

Fort Christanna was built to protect the Virginia colony in two critical ways: as a bulwark intended to ward off the military assault, and as a center for the Christian conversion and education of the Saponi and other Southeastern groups.

Roughly 70 Saponi children were educated and converted to Christianity at Fort Christanna by the missionary teacher Charles Griffin of North Carolina.

By 1717, under charges of monopoly, the Colonial Board of Trade lost interest in the Fort and ordered the Virginia Indian Company to disband and dissolve.

Historians Marvin Richardson and C. S. Everett note historical documentation for the modern Haliwa-Saponi tribe as descending from a group that arose during the 1730s, a tumultuous time of decline of the Indian trade.

The divisive Tuscarora and Yamasee wars affected colonists, Native Americans and Indian trade in Virginia and the Carolinas.

[13] Virginia traders such as Colonel William Eaton, who wanted to continue their business relations with the tribes, also migrated to North Carolina.

[citation needed] In 1740 most of the remaining Saponi in Virginia moved north to Pennsylvania and New York, where they merged with the Iroquois for protection.

After the American Revolutionary War and victory by the colonists, they moved with the Iroquois to Canada, as four of the six nations had been allies of the British and were forced to cede their territories in New York State.

The Haliwa-Saponi community began coalescing in "The Meadows" of southwestern Halifax County, North Carolina immediately after the American Revolution.

[citation needed] Over the course of the 19th century, the Haliwa-Saponi maintained a tight-knit tribal community in modern Halifax, Warren, Nash, and Franklin counties and generally practiced endogamy.

In the binary system that evolved out of the slave society of the South, especially as whites tried to restore white supremacy after Reconstruction, they classified most mixed-race people of any visible African ancestry as black (colored), although ethnic Indians had traditionally had rights as free people of color for decades before the Civil War.

[13] 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.

Tribal leaders in the 1940s, including John C. Hedgepeth, tried to have birth certificates of members indicate their American Indian ethnicity, with little success.

[2] In 2011, the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe was audited by the state of North Carolina and found to have submitted an inaccurate grant application.

"The audit, prompted by a citizen's complaint, alleged false information was included on the tribe's grant application to Golden LEAF for the project."

School board Chairman Gideon Lee declined to identify the teacher in question who downloaded state biology test information, but said that action has been taken against those determined to be involved.

When Professor Robert K. Thomas visited with the Haliwa in the Summer of 1978, the founders and members never mentioned the word "Saponi", instead calling their ancestry "Cherokee".

Originating on the Great Plains, the powwow "also builds on local and regional values, and ideas about tribe, community and race.

The program includes instruction in pottery, beadwork/regalia design and construction, dance/drum classes, and Haliwa-Saponi history, as well as day trips to culturally relevant locations.