The Saura and Keyauwee: The Peoples Who Were Here First

Before the Guilford Courthouse battle, before Greensboro's founding, before the Quaker settlers arrived in the Piedmont, this land belonged to peoples whose names most visitors have never heard.

The Saura, also known as the Cheraw, were a Siouan-speaking people who inhabited the Piedmont of what is now North Carolina and Virginia. They established at least two large village complexes along the Dan River near the Virginia line, Upper Sauratown and Lower Sauratown. The Keyauwee lived in the central Piedmont, in a palisaded village with surrounding cornfields. The English explorer John Lawson, passing through on an expedition in seventeen oh-one, encountered the Keyauwee and estimated their population at about five hundred people.

That number would not hold. European diseases moved through Piedmont communities without warning or remedy. Colonial violence and the slave raiding that accompanied early English settlement in the Carolinas decimated the smaller nations of the interior. By the early eighteenth century, the Saura and Keyauwee had merged with adjacent peoples, moving south and east in an effort to survive. Their political structures did not outlast the century.

The living descendants of these Piedmont peoples include members of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, which is recognized by the state of North Carolina and is based in Orange and Alamance Counties, and communities affiliated with the Catawba Nation to the south. The Saura and Keyauwee do not have a federally recognized tribal government. That absence from the official record does not mean the absence of people.