Our Bloodlines

The Sakochee Tribe is a sovereign tribal nation composed of Native American descendants from many nations—interwoven through time, migration, and history. We are the mixed-blood peoples, long cast out or overlooked, but never erased.

The Sakochee are not defined by a single bloodline, a government roll, or a colonial certificate. We are defined by ancestral truth—passed through grandmothers, hidden in family trees, and whispered through generations.

Many of us descend from:

• Powhatan Confederacy

• Cherokee Nation

• Yankton Sioux

• Pamunkey, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Missouri, Piscataway, Nanticoke, Lenape, and others

Some of our ancestors were:

• Forced to pass as white to avoid removal

• Disenrolled or excluded by tribal politics

• Blended through survival, love, and resistance

We are their descendants—heirs of both the broken treaties and the unbroken spirit.

Being mixed-blood is not confusion. It is completion.

We carry Native ancestry alongside African, European, and other lineages. But our tribal identity is grounded in the Native blood that survived, even when it was denied by governments, institutions, and sometimes even our own families.

To be Sakochee is to:

• Reclaim erased identities

• Honor all parts of who we are

• Stand for others who have been turned away

Chief Ziwahatan traces his ancestry to great names and nations, like:

• Pocahontas – through her daughter Kaokee and son Thomas Rolfe

• Chief Wahanganoche – a Powhatan leader who resisted colonial encroachment

• Ziziwin Sannicawakuwa – a Yankton Sioux woman 

• Mary Ontonah Arroyah Powhatan – descendant of the Powhatan tribe

• Frances Brent, Amelia Withers, Phoebe Sparks, Sarah Caine, and Hannah Boone – mixed-blood women whose stories were nearly erased by history

Each of these ancestral lines is represented in our founding families.