Natchez descendants from Oklahoma and the Eastern Band Natchez from South Carolina will reunite on the site of their ancestral home at this year’s Natchez Powwow at The Grand Village of the Natchez Indians.

The annual event will bring the groups home for the first time since the French dispersed the tribe in the 1730s.

The 19th Natchez Powwow will be March 24-25.

Grand Village Director Jim Barnett said he is looking forward to meeting to meeting the Eastern Band Natchez members and hearing their oral histories.

“It is an especially meaningful event for the symbolism of these groups coming back together after centuries apart,” Barnett said.

The Powwow occurs every March. Native Americans from tribes throughout the United States converge on Grand Village to dance and celebrate their culture and heritage. Food and craft booths will be at the site. The event is open to the public. Admission will be $3 for adults and $1 for children 12 and under.

Barnett said in the aftermath of their defeat by the French, the surviving Natchez fled Mississippi and merged with other pro-English tribes such as the Creek, Chickasaw and Cherokee.

In the 1830s, the Natchez descendants and their adopted tribes were compelled to move to reservations in Oklahoma along the infamous “Trail of Tears.”

A few Native American groups in the southeastern corner of Appalachia managed to avoid being uprooted. Among them were some of the descendants of the Natchez Indians who had sought asylum with those tribes a century earlier. They settled near Charleston, S. C., and came to be known as the Edisto-Kusso Natchez. The Eastern Band Natchez settled nearby in the vicinity of the PeeDee River. The group today numbers nearly 200 members.

Another group of refugee Natchez was captured by the French and sold into enslavement on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue. It is not known whether any descendants of that group have survived.

Nearly three centuries later, the long-separated descendants of the Natchez will have the opportunity to share their histories, and to commune on the piece of ground that was once home to arguably the most complex Native American society in the southeast.

Though the cultural submersion of the Natchez into their adopted tribes was inevitable, through the centuries the Natchez descendants stubbornly preserved what they could of their tribal language and oral tradition. Until his death in 1983, Natchez descendant Archie Sam returned to Grand Village each year to share his preserved store of tribal history.

Sam’s kinsman, Hutke Fields of Notchietown, Okla., is currently recognized as the nominal chief of the Natchez. According to Fields, there are nearly 7,000 tribal members in Oklahoma who can trace some of their heritage back to the Natchez.

The Natchez are currently a treaty tribe within the Muscogee (Creek) Confederation, but Fields is strenuously lobbying for Federal recognition of the Natchez as a sovereign tribal nation.

Additional information can be obtained by calling Grand Village at 601-446-6502.