Tuscarora people
[10] After the migration was completed in the early 18th century, the Tuscarora in New York no longer considered those remaining in North Carolina as members of the tribal nation.
Since the late 20th century, some North Carolina individuals claiming Tuscarora ancestry formed organizations self-identifying as tribes.
Hodge, an early 19th-century historian, wrote that the Tuscarora in North Carolina traditionally were said to occupy the "country lying between the sea shores and the mountains, which divide the Atlantic states," in which they had 24 large towns and could muster about 6,000 warriors, probably meaning persons.
Both groups of Tuscarora suffered substantial population losses after exposure to Eurasian infectious diseases endemic to Europeans.
The southern Tuscarora collaborated with the Pamlico, Cothechney, Coree, Mattamuskeet, and Matchepungoe nations to attack the settlers in a wide range of locations within a short time.
In 1712, this force attacked the southern Tuscarora and other nations in Craven County at Fort Narhontes, on the banks of the Neuse River.
Under the leadership of Tom Blunt, the Tuscarora who remained in North Carolina signed a treaty with the colony in June 1718.
As colonial settlement surrounded Indian Woods, the Tuscarora suffered discrimination and other acts; they were overcharged or denied use of ferries, restricted in hunting, and cheated in trade; their timber was illegally logged, and their lands were continuously encroached upon by herders and squatters.
[17] Over the next several decades, the colonial government continually reduced the Tuscarora tract, forcing cessions of land to the encroaching settlers.
In 1763 and 1766, additional Tuscarora migrated north to settle with other Iroquoian peoples in northern and western Pennsylvania and in New York.
In 1802, the last Indian Woods Tuscarora negotiated a treaty with the United States, by which land would be held for them that they could lease.
[citation needed] The Iroquois Five Nations of New York had penetrated as far as the Tuscarora homeland in North Carolina by 1701, and nominally controlled the entire frontier territory lying in between.
Following their discovery of a linguistically related tribe living beyond Virginia, they were more than happy to accommodate their distant cousins within the Iroquois Constitution as the "Sixth Nation", and to resettle them in safer grounds to the north.
(The Iroquois had driven tribes of rival Indians out of western New York to South Carolina during the Beaver Wars several decades earlier, not far from where the Tuscarora resided.)
[18] After White settlers began to pour into what is now the Martinsburg area from around 1730, the Tuscarora continued northward to join those in western New York.
A record circa 1763 indicates that some Tuscarora had not migrated to the Iroquois, and remained in the Panhandle, instead, and stayed and fought under Shawnee Chief Cornstalk.
[19] During the American Revolutionary War, part of the Tuscarora and Oneida nations in New York allied with the rebel colonists.
Late in the war, the pro-British Tuscarora followed Chief Joseph Brant of the Mohawk, other British-allied tribes, and Loyalists north to Ontario, then called Upper Canada by the British.
In 1803, a final contingent of southern Tuscarora migrated to New York to join the reservation of their tribe in Niagara County.
During the War of 1812 in the British attack on Lewiston, New York, on December 19, 1813, a band of Tuscarora living in a village on an escarpment just above the town fought to save Americans fleeing the invasion force.
Following encounter by the English with the Tuscarora and other tribes, the colonists noted they used the same interpreters to translate with each of the peoples, which meant their languages were closely related.
They are primarily descendants of Tuscarora groups absorbed in the early decades of the 19th century in Ohio by relocated Iroquois, Seneca, and Cayuga bands from New York.
[31] In the spring of 1973 students from NC State and members of the local Tuscarora people staged a protest seeking "federal and state recognition of the autonomous bands of the Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina, the right to run their own school systems, and better job opportunities for Native American communities.
New York leaders consider any individuals remaining in North Carolina as no longer having tribal status, although they might possibly have some Tuscarora ancestry.
