The Tuscarora lived, before the eighteenth century, along the Carolina coastal plain far from the other five Haudenosaunee nations, separated from them long enough that Tuscarora, though still a Northern Iroquoian language, is distinct from the languages of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. From 1711 to 1713 the Tuscarora fought two wars against North Carolina's colonists, aided by South Carolina, Virginia and allied Indigenous nations; large numbers of Tuscarora were killed and others sold into slavery, and the surviving population, reduced to a fraction of its prewar size, asked the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee for sponsorship. The Oneida accepted that request, and over the following decade Tuscarora refugees migrated north in stages to settle among Oneida and other Haudenosaunee territory in central New York and Pennsylvania.
By 1722 the Tuscarora were formally recognized as the Confederacy's sixth nation, a status William Fenton's political history of the confederacy documents as distinct from full founding membership: Tuscarora chiefs sit on the Younger Brothers' side of the Grand Council under Oneida sponsorship, but the nation holds none of the fifty permanent chief titles the five founding nations divided among themselves at the Confederacy's establishment centuries earlier. A Tuscarora reservation near Niagara Falls in New York, on land the Seneca granted in 1797, remains the Tuscarora Nation's home today, distinct from Tuscarora descendants who never migrated north and remain in North Carolina.