The Tuscarora are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government of the Iroquoian family, with members today in New York, USA, and Ontario, Canada. They coalesced as a people around the Great Lakes, likely about the same time as the rise of the Five Nations of the historic Iroquois Confederacy, also Iroquoian-speaking and based then in present-day New York.
Hiawatha, also known as Ayenwatha or Aiionwatha, was a precolonial Native American leader and co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy. He was a leader of the Onondaga people, the Mohawk people, or both. According to some accounts, he was born an Onondaga but adopted into the Mohawks.
Among the Haudenosaunee the Great Law of Peace, also known as Gayanashagowa, is the oral constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy. The law was written on wampum belts, conceived by Dekanawidah, known as the Great Peacemaker, and his spokesman Hiawatha. The original five member nations ratified this constitution near modern-day Victor, New York, with the sixth nation being added in 1722.
Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
The Seneca ( SEN-ik-ə; are a group of Indigenous Iroquoian-speaking people who historically lived south of Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes in North America. Their nation was the farthest to the west within the Six Nations or Iroquois League in New York before the American Revolution. For this reason, they are called “The Keepers of the Western Door.”
The Onondaga people are one of the five original nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy in the Northeastern Woodlands. Their historical homelands are in and around present-day Onondaga County, New York, south of Lake Ontario.
The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking.
The Great Peacemaker, sometimes referred to as Deganawida or Tekanawí:ta was by tradition, along with Jigonhsasee and Hiawatha, the founder of the Haudenosaunee, commonly called the Iroquois Confederacy. This is a political and cultural union of six Iroquoian-speaking Native American tribes residing in the present-day state of New York, northern Pennsylvania, and the eastern portion of the province of Ontario, Canada.
Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands include Native American tribes and First Nation bands residing in or originating from a cultural area encompassing the northeastern and Midwest United States and southeastern Canada. It is part of a broader grouping known as the Eastern Woodlands. The Northeastern Woodlands is divided into three major areas: the Coastal, Saint Lawrence Lowlands, and Great Lakes-Riverine zones.
David Cusick was a Tuscarora artist and the author of David Cusick's Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827). This is an early account of Native American history and myth, written and published in English by a Native American.
Jesse J. Cornplanter was an actor, artist, author, craftsman, Seneca Faithkeeper and decorated veteran of World War I. The last male descendant of Cornplanter, an important 18th-century Haudenosaunee leader and war chief, his Seneca name was Hayonhwonhish. He illustrated several books about Seneca and Iroquois life. Jesse Cornplanter wrote and illustrated Legends of the Longhouse (1938), which records many Iroquois traditional stories. Cornplanter was also the first Native American to play a lead in a feature film titled Hiawatha, which was released in 1913 and a year before the notable Western The Squaw Man.
The Iroquois, also known as the Five Nations or the Six Nations and by the autonym Haudenosaunee, are an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of Native Americans and First Nations peoples in northeast North America and Upstate New York. They were known during the colonial years to the French as the "Iroquois League", and later as the "Iroquois Confederacy". The English called them the "Five Nations", including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. After 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora from the southeast were accepted into the confederacy, which became known as the Six Nations.
Tadodaho was a Native American Hoyenah (sachem) of the Onondaga nation before the Deganawidah and Hiawatha formed the Iroquois League. According to oral tradition, he had extraordinary characteristics and was widely feared, but he was persuaded to support the confederacy of the Five Nations.
Dennis Cusick was a Tuscarora painter from New York and one of the founders of the Iroquois Realist Style of painting.
Sketches of the Ancient History of the Six Nations, by the Tuscarora David Cusick, is a mytho-historical narrative about the Iroquois Confederacy of six tribes: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and, later, the Tuscarora. First published between 1826 and 1827, the work has three parts: "A Tale of the Foundation of the Great Island ;" "A Real Account of the Settlement of North America and their Dissentions", and "Origin of the Kingdom of the Five Nations." It was among the earliest English-language attempts to record Native American history from a Native American perspective.
Simeon Gibson was a member of the Cayuga tribe and the Onondaga Longhouse on the Six Nations Reserve. Gibson (Iroquois) worked closely with Iroquois researchers, including Horatio Hale, David Boyle, Mark Raymond Harrington, A.C. Parker, and John Napoleon Brinton (J.N.B.) Hewitt. Gibson worked with these researchers to interpret his father Chief Gibson’s two records of the Daganawi:dah legend.
The flag of the Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee flag is the flag used to represent the six nations of the Iroquois. It is a purple flag with four connected white squares and an eastern white pine tree in the center.
The Everett Report of 1922 was a New York State Assembly report compiled by a legislative commission led by Edward A. Everett. It concluded that "the Iroquois were fraudulently dispossessed of over six million acres of land in New York." However, the report was "buried" by New York State and not published until 1971.
Apple (Skin to the Core) is a poetic memoir for young adults, written by Eric Gansworth and published October 6, 2020 by Levine Querido. In this book, Gansworth talks about his life as an Onondaga individual, living amongst Tuscaroras, and the impact of residential schooling. As he covers these topics, he discusses common slurs against Indigenous Americans, including the term "apple," which refers to someone who is "red on the outside, white on the inside," that is, who looks Indigenous but acts white.
The History of the Five Indian Nations is a book by natural scientist and the governor of the Province of New York Cadwallader Colden. It was first published in New York in 1727 and a second edition was published in London in 1747.
