Tuscarora Nation

Origins

The Tuscarora lived on the coastal plain of North Carolina along the Roanoke, Tar and Neuse rivers, an Iroquoian-speaking people among Algonquian and Siouan neighbours. Their language and traditions point to an ancient kinship with the Haudenosaunee to the north. By the 17th century they formed several groups of towns, trading deerskins with English traders from Virginia.

Rule and society

Towns were led by their own chiefs, with the southern towns under Hancock and the northern under Tom Blount by 1711. Colonial traders cheated them, slave raiders seized their people, and settlers at New Bern encroached on their land. In 1711 Hancock's towns attacked the settlements and executed the surveyor John Lawson, beginning the Tuscarora War. Colonial forces with Yamasee allies destroyed their stronghold of Neoheroka in 1713.

To the present

Most Tuscarora moved north and around 1722 were adopted as the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. Many sided with the Americans in the Revolution. Today the Tuscarora Nation lives near Lewiston, New York, and at Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario.