Tuscarora

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.

When Tuscarora refugees first arrived in Haudenosaunee territory in the early eighteenth century, other nations offered to absorb them individually: Oneida, Onondaga and Seneca each proposed taking Tuscarora families in as adoptees into their own existing structures, a path that would have ended Tuscarora as a distinct people within the Confederacy. William Fenton's political history of the confederacy records that the Tuscarora resisted this path for roughly seven years, choosing instead to be recognized in 1722 as a sixth nation in their own right, under Oneida sponsorship, rather than dissolve into any one of the five founding nations. The choice cost them the fifty permanent chief titles the five founders had divided among themselves at the Confederacy's establishment; Tuscarora sits on the Younger Brothers' side of the Grand Council without one of its own, represented through the Oneida relationship that had sponsored its admission in the first place.

Tuscarora, the nation's own language, continues to be distinguished from the other five Confederacy languages by the centuries of separation that preceded the migration north, and the Tuscarora Nation of New York, near Niagara Falls, maintains its own identity distinct from Tuscarora descendants in North Carolina who never made the journey. The Longhouse religion and Christianity are both practiced among Tuscarora communities today, as across the wider Confederacy, and ceremonial and medicine society knowledge is restricted to initiated members rather than set out for a general readership.