Sissipahaw

[Linda]

The name of one of the lesser known tribes in the NC piedmont "Sissipahaw" is intriguing me. The word "foot" in Tutelo is "isi," the word for "black" is "asepi." Seems to me that I'm seeing the word blackfoot in there.

What made me notice this was seeing that there is a tribe out west known as the Blackfoot Sioux, or Sihasapas. "Siha" means foot, "sapa" means black. Probably doesn't mean anything about a physical connection between us and them, but I have a feeling it's telling us how words are formed.

I'll see someone very familiar with Tutelo this weekend. More later.

[Linda]

I'm happy. I talked to my Tutelo speaking friend about the word Sissipahaw. He said it was the name of a village and that yes, it means blackfoot. It was in what is now Graham, NC.

There are a number of words for the Saponi/Tutelo/Eastern Siouan people, mostly corruptions of Tutelo words, with many corrupted variations of the same words. Even the Haw river is an abbrevation of the 'haw' sound in "Sissipahaw." He said the North Carolinians were country farmers who used badly corrupted, abbreviated words, the Virginians were more educated and relatively accurate, both trying to duplicate the same words.

[Linda]

Something exciting happened regarding all this. I had posted several times to the Melungeon Genforum and went into my theories about the Blackfoot/Saponi. One of the people involved in that thread sent it on to a friend of his who's contributing to a book that's being published on the ethnic origins of the Melungeons. He asked me to write an article about these ideas.

I did. Here's the link to it.

saponitown.com/blackfoot (http://www.saponitown.com/blackfoot.htm)


[This message has been edited by Linda (edited 06-11-2001).]