Waʔtkekwanęherá·thęʔ ~ We Welcome You
The Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina is comprised of three autonomous bands who act together as one nation. It has always been our way to live in autonomous villages, dispersed over oftentimes great distances. Our three communities of Maxton Longhouse, Prospect Longhouse and Saddletree are spread across Robeson County, NC. We include the colonial state of NC in our name to distinguish us from our relatives in New York and Six Nations, Ontario, but know that we are older than North Carolina. We are older than America.
Yękwanę́hawęh waʔkatkáhryeʔ. Our corn spoke and corroborated our migration history. DNA analysis of our Tuscarora white corn tells of where we migrated from thousands of years ago in what is now known as the southwestern U.S. & northwestern Mexico. We call our migration pattern “The Grapevine,” which carried us from that area across the Great Plains to the Mississippi River to the Ohio Valley to what is now New York to present day North Carolina, where we have stayed for approximately 2,400 years. We are the treaty-holding descendants of the chiefs, clan mothers, warriors and general population of the Tuscarora Nation from Indian Woods Reservation and the traditional Tuscarora strongholds of northeastern and eastern NC. Throughout the colonial period of the 1700's and particularly the Tuscarora War (1711-1715), our Chief Tom Blount led the northern Tuscarora villages, which was distinguished from the southern Tuscarora villages, led by Chief Hancock. We were once the most powerful nation in the region, but our power was broken after the Tuscarora War and after decades of mistreatment by settlers at the reservation, our chiefs and headmen secured land grants in our old hunting grounds that is now Robeson County, NC for the purpose of carrying our Council Fire to a new community, away from the settlers, where we could thrive again.
The Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina has never owned or operated a casino and have no intentions to.
Although we stay in one of the most economically disadvantaged regions of NC, for years we have provided a community food bank, not only for Tuscarora citizens, but for all people. The first Surveyor General assigned to NC by the English Queen, John Lawson, wrote of us circa 1709: "’They are very kind, and charitable to one another, but more especially to those of their own Nation’ and when one loses a household or important goods, the rest pitch in to help. They say, ‘It is our duty thus to do; we must give him our help, otherwise our society will fall.’” Lawson also wrote that there was no poverty in Tuscarora villages; that if one had no food, the rest of the village would provide food for that person. These values have defined us communally since time immemorial.
