We here at Buddha's Belly would like to take a moment to ackowledge that the land where we work and live is stolen land. We live in Yadkin County and work in Forsyth County which is the territory of the Cheraw, Mánu: Yį Įsuwą (Catawba), Occaneechi, Yesan (Tutelo), and, Keyauwee people. 

The Cheraw people, also known as the Saraw or Saura, were a Siouan-speaking tribe of Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, in the Piedmont area of North Carolina near the Sauratown Mountains, east of Pilot Mountain and north of the Yadkin River. They lived in villages near the Catawba River.Their first European and African contact was with the Hernando De Soto Expedition in 1540. The early explorer John Lawson included them in the larger eastern-Siouan confederacy, which he called "the Esaw Nation."

After attacks in the late 17th century and early 18th century, they moved to the southeast around the Pee Dee River, where the Cheraw name became more widely used. They became extinct as a tribe, although some descendants survived as remnant peoples.

The Catawba, also known as Issa, Essa or Iswä but most commonly Iswa (Catawba: Ye Iswąˀ – "people of the river"),are a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans, known as the Catawba Indian Nation Their current lands are in South Carolina, on the Catawba River, near the city of Rock Hill. Their territory once extended into North Carolina, as well, and they still have legal claim to some parcels of land in that state. They were once considered one of the most powerful Southeastern tribes in the Carolina Piedmont, as well as one of the most powerful tribes in the South as a whole, with other, smaller tribes merging into the Catawba as their post-contact numbers dwindled due to the effects of colonization on the region.

The Catawba were among the East Coast tribes who made selective alliances with some of the early European colonists, when these colonists agreed to help them in their ongoing conflicts with other tribes. These were primarily the tribes of different language families: the Iroquois, who ranged south from the Great Lakes area and New York; the Algonquian Shawnee and Lenape (Delaware); and the Iroquoian Cherokee, who fought for control over the large Ohio Valley (including what is in present-day West Virginia). During the American Revolutionary War the Catawba supported the American colonists against the British. Decimated by colonial smallpox epidemics, warfare and cultural disruption, the Catawba declined markedly in number in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some Catawba continued to live in their homelands in South Carolina, while others joined the Choctaw or Cherokee, at least temporarily.

The Occaneechi (also Occoneechee and Akenatzy) are Native Americans who lived in the 17th century primarily on the large, 4-mile (6.4 km) long Occoneechee Island and east of the confluence of the Dan and Roanoke rivers, near current-day Clarksville, Virginia. They spoke one of the Siouan languages, and thus related to the Saponi, Tutelo,Eno and other Southeastern Siouan-language peoples living in the Piedmont region of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.

In 1676, in the course of Bacon's Rebellion, the tribe was attacked by militias from the Colony of Virginia and decimated. Also under demographic pressure from European settlements and newly introduced infectious diseases, the Saponi and Tutelo came to live near the Occaneechi on adjacent islands. By 1714 the Occaneechi moved to join the Tutelo, Saponi, and other Siouan people living on a 36-square-mile (93 km2) reservation in current-day Brunswick County, Virginia. It included a fort called Christanna. The Siouan people had been drastically reduced to approximately 600 people. Fort Christanna was closed in 1717, after which there are few written references to the Occaneechi. Colonists recorded that they left the area in 1740 and migrated north for protection with the Iroquois.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, some remnant Siouan peoples gathered together and worked to retain their identity as Native Americans. In the late 20th century, they organized as the self-named Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. In 2002 the tribe was formally recognized by the state of North Carolina. The members of the tribe live primarily in Alamance and Orange Counties.

In 1701, they were noted as living at the headwaters of the Yadkin River in North Carolina. After 1714, the Saponi and Tutelo, collectively known as a Nahyssan, resided at Junkatapurse around Fort Christanna in Brunswick County, Virginia, near the border with North Carolina.

After the signing of the 1722 Treaty of Albany, the Iroquois ceased their attacks upon the Tutelo. In the 1730s, Tutelo people moved north to Shamokin, Pennsylvania,and sought the protection of the Oneida viceroy, Shickellamy.After 1753, the Cayuga formally agreed to take in the Tutelo, who moved to the south side of Cayuga Lake and eastern Cayuga Inlet, near present-day Ithaca, New York.

The Tutelo village of Coreorgonel was located near present-day Ithaca, New York and Buttermilk Falls State Park.There they lived under the protection of the Cayuga until Coreorgonel, along with many other Iroquois towns, was destroyed during the American Revolutionary War by the Sullivan Expedition of 1779. It was retaliation for British-Iroquois raids against the American rebels.

The Tutelo went with the Iroquois to Canada, where the British offered land for resettlement at what became known as the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation. In 1785, 75 Tutelos lived among 1,200 residents on the Six Nations reserve. They continued to live among the Cayuga and were eventually absorbed by them through intermarriage. The last known full-blooded Tutelo speaker, Nikonha or Waskiteng ("Old Mosquito") died in 1870 at the age of 105. He had given extensive linguistic material to the scholar Horatio Hale, who confirmed the Tutelo language as a Siouan language.

The Keyauwee Indians were a small North Carolina tribe, native to the area of present day Randolph County, North Carolina. The Keyauwee village was surrounded by palisades and cornfields about thirty miles northeast of the Yadkin River, near present day High Point, North Carolina.The Keyauwee village was vulnerable to attack, so the Keyauwee constantly joined with other tribes for better protection.They joined with the Tutelo, Saponi, Occaneechi, and the Shakori tribes, moving to the Albemarle Sound with the last two for a settlement that would later be foiled. The Keyauwee would move further southward along with the Cheraw and Peedee tribes, close along the border of the two Carolinas, where they conducted deerskin trade with Charleston traders and allied with the Indian neighbors in the Yamassee War. Eventually, their tribe name vanished from historical records, and with time, they were absorbed by the Catawba tribe.