![]() Map showing tribal lands of the Tutelo prior to 1600 | |
Total population | |
---|---|
Extinct as a tribe [1] | |
Regions with significant populations | |
West Virginia, Virginia (until 1740s), Ontario (1779-ca. 1900) (descendants assimilated into Cayuga nation) | |
Languages | |
Siouan Tutelo language | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Occaneechi, Manahoac, Monacan, after 18th century: Cayuga |
The Tutelo (also Totero, Totteroy, Tutera; Yesan in Tutelo) were Native American people living above the Fall Line in present-day Virginia and West Virginia. They spoke a dialect of the Siouan Tutelo language thought to be similar to that of their neighbors, the Monacan and Manahoac nations.
Under pressure from English settlers and Seneca Iroquois, they joined with other Virginia Siouan tribes in the late 17th century and became collectively known as the Nahyssan. By 1740, they had largely left Virginia and migrated north to seek protection from their former Iroquois opponents. They were adopted by the Cayuga tribe of New York in 1753. [2] [1] Ultimately, their descendants migrated into Canada. [1]
The English name Tutelo comes from the Algonquian variant of the name that the Iroquois used for all the Virginia Siouan tribes: Toderochrone (with many variant spellings). The Tutelo autonym (name for themselves) was Yesañ, Yesáh, Yesáng, Yesą, Yesan, Yesah, or Yesang. This may also be connected with the name Nahyssan, as well as earlier colonial-era spellings, such as Monahassanough (John Smith). [3]
The name Oniasont appeared on 17th-century French maps. Amateur historian Charles A. Hanna believed that name of the Nahyssan recorded in West Virginia and western Virginia during the same period, i.e. the Tutelo, a Siouan language-speaking people. Others theorize that Honniasont may have been considered an Iroquoian language.
Aside from getting many native plants from their natural habitat, the Tutelo people have been linked to Tutelo Strawberry Corn and may have grown predecessor varieties of Boston Mallow Squash and Oronoco Tobacco. Boston Mallow was developed by horticulturalists in Boston, MA in the 19th century from seed said to have been traceable back to a group of Natives in the vicinity of Buffalo, NY around the end of the Revolutionary War. Some documents seem to suggest the Iroquois had sent a group of people there to reestablish farms ravaged during the war and they were led by the then chief of the Tutelo and may have therefore been mostly Tutelo. [4]
Corn would have been a fairly recent arrival to their home region at the time of contact and they probably did not come to Virginia with it, as they may have with other seed varieties. This shows in their word for corn- mandahe- seemingly being an amalgamation of the Algonquian word Mandamin and the Iroquoian word nehe.
Tutelo oral history states that they originated in Ohio and likely only a few centuries before European arrival. Their language shares many loan words with the Mosopelea language, the only Fort Ancient language on record, suggesting that they were once neighboring cultures. Since Tutelo housing was similar to that of Monongahela culture, and their burial mounds were similar to those found in northeast Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
The Tutelo historic homeland was said to include the area of the Big Sandy River on the West Virginia–Kentucky border, which they called the "Totteroy River." The Iroquois drove them from this region during the later Beaver Wars (c. 1670), after which the Iroquois established the Ohio Valley as their hunting ground by right of conquest. Charles Hanna believed their name, first appearing as Oniasont on 17th-century French maps, to be a variation of the name of the tribe recorded in West Virginia and western Virginia at the same time period, as Nahyssan and Monahassanough, i.e. the Tutelo, a Siouan language-speaking people. [3]
Although previously known to the Virginia colonists by their other names, a form of Tutelo first appeared in Virginia records in 1671, when the Batts and Fallam expedition noted their visit to "Totero Town" near what is now Salem, Virginia. A few years later, the Tutelo joined the Saponi to live on islands located where the Dan and Staunton rivers join to become the Roanoke River. It was just above the territory of the Occaneechi. [5] For a time, the Tutelo had a settlement on the banks of the New River. Many of the sherds collected there and the small triangular points, suggest a mid- to late 16th-century or an early 17th-century date. [6]
Between 1671 and 1701, Tutelo abandoned their homelands and joined the Occaneechi. [1]
In 1701, they were noted as living at the headwaters of the Yadkin River in North Carolina. After 1714, the Saponi and Tutelo, collectively known as a Nahyssan, resided at Junkatapurse around Fort Christanna in Brunswick County, Virginia, near the border with North Carolina. [5]
After the signing of the 1722 Treaty of Albany, the Iroquois ceased their attacks upon the Tutelo. [7] In the 1730s, Tutelo people moved north to Shamokin, Pennsylvania, [1] and sought the protection of the Oneida viceroy, Shickellamy (had a Tutelo wife). [7] After 1753, the Cayuga formally agreed to take in the Tutelo, who moved to the south side of Cayuga Lake and eastern Cayuga Inlet, [1] near present-day Ithaca, New York. [2]
The Tutelo village of Coreorgonel was located near present-day Ithaca, New York and Buttermilk Falls State Park. [8] There they lived under the protection of the Cayuga until Coreorgonel, along with many other Iroquois towns, was destroyed during the American Revolutionary War by the Sullivan Expedition of 1779. It was retaliation for British-Iroquois raids against the American rebels. [9]
The Tutelo went with the Iroquois to Canada, where the British offered land for resettlement at what became known as the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation. In 1785, 75 Tutelos lived among 1,200 residents on the Six Nations reserve. [10] They continued to live among the Cayuga and were eventually absorbed by them through intermarriage. [11] The last known full-blooded Tutelo speaker, Nikonha or Waskiteng ("Old Mosquito") died in 1870 at the age of 105. [12] He had given extensive linguistic material to the scholar Horatio Hale, who confirmed the Tutelo language as a Siouan language. His father's name was Onusowa, a Tutelo chief who established a village in New York state. During the Revolutionary War in 1779. Their village was attacked during the Sullivan Expedition, which was an American operation to destroy the pro-British elements of the Six Nations in New York.
John Key, also known as Gostango (meaning "Below the Rock") and Nastabon ("One Step") survived Nikonha as the last recorded fluent speaker of the Tutelo language. He died on March 23, 1898, at 78 years old. Chief John Buck (Onondaga/Tutelo, ca. 1818–1893) was a Haudenosaunee firekeeper at the Oshweken Longhouse on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. He recounted Tutelo stories to American ethnologists John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt and Frank Speck. [13]
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 Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation is a state-recognized tribe in North Carolina.
Siouan or Siouan–Catawban is a language family of North America that is located primarily in the Great Plains, Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southeastern North America with a few other languages in the east.
The Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe, also the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, is a state-recognized tribe and nonprofit organization in North Carolina. They are not federally recognized as a Native American tribe.
The Monacan Indian Nation is one of eleven Native American tribes recognized since the late 20th century by the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia. In January 2018, the United States Congress passed an act to provide federal recognition as tribes to the Monacan and five other tribes in Virginia. They had earlier been so disrupted by land loss, warfare, intermarriage, and discrimination that the main society believed they no longer were "Indians". However, the Monacans reorganized and asserted their culture.
The Mosopelea, or Ofo, were a Siouan-speaking Native American people who historically lived near the upper Ohio River. In reaction to Iroquois Confederacy invasions to take control of hunting grounds in the late 17th century, they moved south to the lower Mississippi River. They finally settled in central Louisiana, where they assimilated with the Tunica and the Siouan-speaking Biloxi. They spoke the Ofo language, generally classified as a Siouan language.
The Saponi are a Native American tribe historically based in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia. They spoke a Siouan language, related to the languages of the Tutelo, Biloxi, and Ofo.
The Eastern Siouan branch consists of various historical languages spoken by Siouan peoples of the Appalachian Plateau and Piedmont regions of present-day Virginia and the Carolinas. These languages are sometimes collectively referred to as Catawban, Tutelo, Tutelo-Saponi, or Yesah (Yesa:sahį). Eastern Siouan languages were historical spoken by the Monacan Indian Nation, Haliwa-Saponi, Catawba/Iswa, Occaneechi, and Waccamaw peoples. They possibly represent a dialect continuum with Ohio Valley Siouan languages. The Catawban family is a branch of the larger Siouan a.k.a. Siouan–Catawban family.
The Manahoac, also recorded as Mahock, were a small group of Siouan-language Native Americans in northern Virginia at the time of European contact. They numbered approximately 1,000 and lived primarily along the Rappahannock River west of modern Fredericksburg and the Fall Line, and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They united with the Monacan, the Occaneechi, the Saponi and the Tutelo. They disappeared from the historical record after 1728.
The Cheraw people, also known as the Saraw or Saura, were a Siouan-speaking tribe of Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, in the Piedmont area of North Carolina near the Sauratown Mountains, east of Pilot Mountain and north of the Yadkin River. They lived in villages near the Catawba River. Their first European and African contact was with the Hernando De Soto Expedition in 1540. The early explorer John Lawson included them in the larger eastern-Siouan confederacy, which he called "the Esaw Nation."
The Occaneechi are Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands whose historical territory was in the Piedmont region of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.
The Eno or Enoke, also called Stuckenock, was an American Indian tribe located in North Carolina during the 17th and 18th centuries that was later absorbed into the Catawba tribe in South Carolina along with various other smaller tribal bands.
The Honniasont were a little-known Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands originally from eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. They appear to have inhabited the upper Ohio River valley, above Louisville, Kentucky.
Fort Christanna was one of the projects of Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood, who was governor of the Virginia Colony 1710–1722. When Fort Christanna opened in 1714, Capt. Robert Hicks was named captain of the fort and relocated his family to the area. His homestead Hicks' Ford is located near the municipality of Emporia in Greensville County, VA. The fort was designed to offer protection and schooling to the tributary Siouan and Iroquoian tribes living to the southwest of the colonized area of Virginia. Located in what became Brunswick County, Virginia, near Gholsonville, the fort was completed in 1714 and enjoyed three successful years of operation as the westernmost outpost of the British Empire at the time, before being finally closed by the House of Burgesses in 1718. However, the Saponi and Tutelo continued to live on the allotted land, 6 miles square, into the 1730s and 1740s.
The Mingo people are an Iroquoian group of Native Americans, primarily Seneca and Cayuga, who migrated west from New York to the Ohio Country in the mid-18th century, and their descendants. Some Susquehannock survivors also joined them, and assimilated. Anglo-Americans called these migrants mingos, a corruption of mingwe, an Eastern Algonquian name for Iroquoian-language groups in general. The Mingo have also been called "Ohio Iroquois" and "Ohio Seneca".
Nikonha, also known as Waskiteng and Mosquito, was known as the last full-blooded speaker of Tutelo, a Virginia Siouan language. He is reported to have been around 106 years old when he died at Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation, Ontario in 1871, where his people had migrated with the Cayuga during the American Revolutionary War.
Tutelo, also known as Tutelo–Saponi, is a member of the Virginian branch of Siouan languages that were originally spoken in what is now Virginia and West Virginia in the United States.
The protohistoric period of the state of West Virginia in the United States began in the mid-sixteenth century with the arrival of European trade goods. Explorers and colonists brought these goods to the eastern and southern coasts of North America and were brought inland by native trade routes. This was a period characterized by increased intertribal strife, rapid population decline, the abandonment of traditional life styles, and the extinction and migrations of many Native American groups.
The Keyauwee Indians were a small North Carolina tribe, native to the area of present day Randolph County, North Carolina. The Keyauwee village was surrounded by palisades and cornfields about thirty miles northeast of the Yadkin River, near present day High Point, North Carolina. The Keyauwee village was vulnerable to attack, so the Keyauwee constantly joined with other tribes for better protection. They joined with the Tutelo, Saponi, Occaneechi, and the Shakori tribes, moving to the Albemarle Sound with the last two for a settlement that would later be foiled. The Keyauwee would move further southward along with the Cheraw and Peedee tribes, close along the border of the two Carolinas, where they conducted deerskin trade with Charleston traders and allied with the Indian neighbors in the Yamassee War. Eventually, their tribe name vanished from historical records, and with time, they were absorbed by the Catawba tribe.
Coreorgonel was an 18th-century Native American village in what is now Tompkins County, New York. The name has been translated as "Where we keep the pipe of peace."