My proposed project, “The Tuscarora: A History of the Sixth Iroquois Nation,” seeks to present a complete history of the Tuscarora nation including evidence of the merging of Native American, African, and European technologies, traditions and cultures. It also seeks to for the first time to examine the numerous bi-racial and tri-racial people who claim to be descendants of the Tuscarora. It has become evident from studying a small tri-racial community in northeastern North Carolina known as Indian Woods, that there are a number of these people in rural areas of eastern North Carolina, southeastern Virginia and at least twelve other states which are linked to the Tuscarora.
According to the oral history of some Tuscarora their tri-racial origins begin in 1586 when they attacked Ralph Lane on the Roanoke River. According to this legend the Tuscarora attacked and pursued Lane and his men to Roanoke Island where they found over three hundred African and West Indian Maroons who had been left there by Sir Francis Drake who promptly took Lane and his men back to England. According to the Tuscarora they absorbed these Maroons into their society and a year later, in 1587, most of the white men, women, and children of the “Lost Colony.” They refused to absorb several of the colonists who had blonde or red hair which they had never seen before. These colonists were feared as "children of the sun" and were therefore put in a canoe and sent south into the Pamlico Sound to the lands of the Croatan Indians. It is believed these whites were taken in by the Croatans and became the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County North Carolina whom are also bi and tri-racial.
This research looks at this legend and the fact that these are the only North Carolina Indians to claim to have attacked and destroyed the “Lost Colony.” It also examines reports as early 1650 by traders, explorers, and settlers in North Carolina and Virginia and by 1722 in southern New England and the Middle Colonies of Tuscarora with European characteristics. It was these European characteristics such as blonde, brown, and auburn hair and green, blue and gray eyes, which distinguished these Indians from other Indian Nations. Their distinctive eyes for example became known among the Tuscarora and the Indians they traded with as the “Tuscarora Eye.” They also became known for harboring runaway slaves and intermarrying with them.
After the defeat of the Tuscarora in North Carolina during the Tuscarora War from 1711 to 1713 and their forced migration to New York on the “Tuscarora Trail” or “Death Trail,” communities of tri-racial Tuscarora can be documented in every state they passed through on their way to rejoin the Iroquois Confederacy or leave North Carolina. Many who carried the “Tuscarora Eye” followed ancient trading and migratory routes west and north where they say they originated. Scores of these refugees from the war chose to settle in isolated valleys and rural areas away from whites and their kinsmen of the Iroquois Confederacy. In these places they intermarried with each other and runaway slaves to eliminate their European characteristics. Others of their group intermarried with whites to avoid persecution but all refused to deny their tri-racial heritage. They were unable, however, to acknowledge their Tuscarora ancestry because of an order by the North Carolina Colonial Assembly which called for their complete extermination in 1715 following the Tuscarora War. As a result many claimed to be Cherokee because the Cherokee had aided the colony in the Tuscarora War and were revered by whites. Others refused to state their race or to be classified as black, white or Native American.
This research examines the northern areas the Tuscarora lived in, passed through and migrated to including; Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, western Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. It hopes to uncover whether or not a number of the region’s tri-racial people may have originated in eastern North Carolina and understand how these people survived in the colonial and antebellum north and efforts by courts and society to define their racial identity. These people and recognized Tuscarora in North Carolina, New York, Canada, and Oklahoma will be visited and interviewed. Their ancestral lands in North Carolina and New York and current communities will be mapped to show where the migrated to and the routes they used to get there.
Thus I am interested in 17th, 18th, and 19th-century manuscripts, journals, dairies, historic maps, drawings, pictures, newspapers and other materials that document and illustrate the lives of the Tuscarora and these mixed-blooded people in the south, New England and the Middle colonies and later states that relate to the Tuscarora Indians, the Iroquois Confederacy, blacks and whites.
I am also interested in conducting oral interviews with people who have spent their entire lives in these small rural Tuscarora communities in states and counties the Tuscarora were known to have settled in.