Cayuga

Cayuga territory around the lake that carries the nation's name, in the Finger Lakes region of central New York, was largely destroyed during the American Revolution. Most Cayuga, like most of the Confederacy apart from the Oneida, remained allied with the British Crown, and in 1779 the Continental Army's Sullivan Campaign, ordered by George Washington in retaliation for Haudenosaunee and Loyalist raids on American settlements, burned Cayuga towns, longhouses and stored food supplies along with Seneca targets further west. Barbara Graymont's academic account of the Six Nations in the Revolution documents the campaign's scale and its deliberate targeting of the food and shelter an approaching winter would otherwise have depended on, a strategy meant to break the nations' ability to make war rather than to meet them in open battle.

Cayuga did not recover its prewar homeland afterward. Within a few years of the war's end, the nation sold its remaining New York lands under pressure and dispersed in several directions at once: the largest number settled at Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario, on land Britain set aside for its wartime Haudenosaunee allies, while others remained in New York among the Seneca at the Cattaraugus Reservation, and still others eventually moved west to what became Indian Territory, ancestors of today's Seneca-Cayuga Nation in Oklahoma. No single reservation in New York carries the Cayuga name today, a fact that reflects this dispersal rather than the absence of a living Cayuga nation, which continues across all three of the communities the eighteenth century scattered it into.

On the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Cayuga sits with Oneida as one of the two Younger Brother nations, opposite Mohawk and Seneca as Elder Brothers, with Onondaga's chiefs presiding between them as Firekeepers. William Fenton's political history of the confederacy records ten chief titles held by Cayuga among the fifty the founding five nations divided at the confederacy's establishment, the largest delegation of any nation apart from Onondaga's Firekeepers, a standing that reflects Cayuga's place among the founding nations rather than its present landholding, which the eighteenth century dispersal left without a reservation bearing the Cayuga name in New York.

Cayuga, sometimes rendered from the nation's own name for itself as referring to the pipe or to the swampy land around the lake it once bordered, is today spoken by very few people, and language revival work is underway among Cayuga descendants at Six Nations of the Grand River, at Cattaraugus, and in Oklahoma. The Longhouse religion and Christianity are both practiced across these dispersed Cayuga communities, and, as with the wider Confederacy, ceremonial and medicine society knowledge is restricted to initiated members and is not set out here. The Grand Council still recognizes the Cayuga bench and its titles even where the nation's own eighteenth century territory does not survive as a reservation, a distinction between political standing and current landholding that runs through Haudenosaunee history more widely.