TUSCARORA

The Tuscarora were an Iroquoian-speaking people, part of the Iroquois League of Six Nations along with the CAYUGA, MOHAWK, ONEIDA, ONONDAGA, and SENECA, known collectively as the IROQUOIS (hau-

DENOSAUNEE). Their name, pronounced tusk-uh-ROAR-uh, or Ska-Buh-Reh in its Native form, identifies them as the “shirt-wearing people.”

The Tuscarora originally lived in villages in the part of North America that was to become northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia, especially along the Pamlico, Neuse, and Trent Rivers on the Atlantic coastal plain and the rolling hills of the Piedmont. Their way of life in this location included farming, woodland hunting and gathering, river fishing, and fishing and collecting shellfish in the ocean.

In the early 1700s, the Tuscarora migrated to New York among the Haudenosaunee. In 1722, they were formally recognized as the sixth nation of the Iroquois League. Their culture became closer to that of their new allies as they adjusted to the northern inland location and began participating in Haudenosaunee rituals. Their Iroquoian dialect also evolved.

The hostilities that caused their departure from North Carolina—the Tuscarora War—were especially unnecessary because the Tuscarora had been friendly to the English colonists. They not only had provided them with knowledge about wilderness survival and with food, but also had helped them in their conflicts with other tribes. Yet settlers took their best farmlands; traders cheated them; and slavers kidnapped them to ship them to the Caribbean or to Europe.

Because of the continuing abuses, Tuscarora warriors under Chief Hancock raided settlements between the Trent and Neuse Rivers in 1711, killing perhaps as many as 200 men, women, and children. Angry settlers sought revenge. They managed to capture a Tuscarora man, whom they roasted alive. Area tribes, such as the Coree, joined the Tuscarora cause. The colonies of North and South Carolina raised a militia under Colonel John Barnwell. Many of his soldiers were YAMASEE. They marched into Tuscarora territory, moving on Hancock’s village of Cotechney. After a standoff, peace was made. But Barnwell violated it by seizing other Tuscarora as slaves. The Indians commenced raiding once again.

Another colonial army was organized under Colonel James Moore. Many Yamasee joined this force too. This army marched on the Tuscarora village of Neoheroka in 1713 and killed or captured almost 1,000 Tuscarora. Captives were sold into slavery at 10 pounds sterling each to finance Moore’s military campaign. It was at this time that many of the surviving Tuscarora migrated north. Some lived on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania for a time before moving to Haudenosaunee country in New York near the Oneida. Some members of those villages not part of the uprising were permitted to stay unmolested in North Carolina, but in years to come they too joined their relatives in the north. By 1804, only a few scattered Tus-carora families remained in the South.

The Tuscarora did not have direct votes at the Iroquois League’s Great Council. The Oneida, among whom they originally settled, represented them. Otherwise, the Tus-carora were treated as equals in the confederacy.

In the American Revolution, most Tuscarora and Oneida sided with the Americans against the British. This caused a rift in the Iroquois League, since the other Haudenosaunee tribes supported the British. After the Revolution, despite their assistance in the American cause, settlers turned against the Tuscarora too and burned their longhouses along with those of the pro-British tribes. The Tuscarora eventually were granted state reservation lands in the northwestern corner of New York in Seneca country near Niagara Falls, where their descendants live today. They later purchased additional adjoining lands. Those Tuscarora who had sided with the British settled on the Grand River near Brantford, Ontario, as part of the Six Nations Reserve.

In 1957, the Tuscarora Nation of New York refused to sell off part of its lands for a proposed reservoir to be built by the New York State Power Authority. When state officials went forward with the plan, the Tus-carora protested. The case went to the U. S. Supreme Court, which decided against the Tuscarora. But their

Tuscarora silver belt buckle (modern)

Political and legal resistance, which received international attention, helped shape pan-Indian activism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Tuscarora, many of whom hold industrial jobs in Buffalo and Niagara Falls, continue to participate in the shared activities of the Haudenosaunee. Every summer since 1927, Tuscarora and members of other tribes gather to march across the U. S.-Canada border at the Whirlpool Bridge east of Niagara Falls. The annual Border Crossing Celebration is sponsored by the Indian Defense League of America (IDLA), founded by Chief

Clinton Rickard in 1926 to promote unrestricted crossings as supposedly guaranteed in the Jay Treaty of 1794 and reaffirmed in the Treaty of Ghent of 1814, as well as to resist the erosion of Native rights. Jolene Rickard, granddaughter of the chief and a renowned photographer, has organized the event in recent years, and his great granddaughters have carried the IDLA banner. Barbara Graymont, who helped Clinton Rickard write his autobiography, The Fighting Tuscarora, published two years after the chief’s death in 1973, has also participated in the event.