The story of their adventures en route to their new home would be a real saga, could it ever be written. Eventually they took refuge in Oneida territory and were admitted to the League in 1722 at Oneida sponsorship. At first the Tuscarora settled in several areas about New York—the Hudson Valley, the Genesee Valley, and midstate.
Maybe because they knew something about a fight for independence, most Tuscarora sided with the young United States in its first struggle with the British Empire. A few joined the Iroquois allies of the British and lived after the Revolution in Ontario. Those who stayed in the States established a national home by buying their lands near Lewiston, New York.
Memorable nineteenth-century Tuscarora include the historians David Cusick (1780–1831) and J. N. B. Hewitt (1857–1937). A major figure in this book is the late twentieth-century activist, celebrity, and medicine man Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson (1927–1985). His friend, and another of coauthor Michael Bastine’s tutors, was the late author and medicine man Ted Williams (1930–2005). Our contemporary, the tobacco tycoon “Smokin’ Joe” Anderson, is a powerful, influential figure.
By the early nineteenth century, many Tuscarora were Christians, and most of the nation is Christian today. Among some of them is a feeling that those Tuscarora who took up the Longhouse religion of Handsome Lake from the beginning may be “the real Indians.” No Tuscarora should have a need to envy anyone.
“The Shirt-Wearing People” fought like tigers in 1813 for their new neighbors, the whites of Lewiston, after the fall of Fort Niagara. That December massacre of unarmed civilians would have been a lot worse had not a small force of Tuscarora roused the village, sheltered refugees, and held the line just long enough against the British and Native American storm coming up from the Niagara River.
IROQUOIS LANGUAGES
Iroquois refers to a language family. It’s a lot like the word Celtic in that regard. There are Iroquoian language speakers who are not members of the Confederacy. There are Celtic speakers who aren’t Irish—or Welsh or Scottish.
Each of the six Longhouse nations has its own distinct language. To a linguist, the languages are very similar, sharing many word roots and grammatical principles. That doesn’t mean the speakers can understand each other. In fact, pronunciation, accent, and other variables make many Iroquoian languages as mutually unintelligible as German and English. (“Mohawk is really weird,” said one of our Seneca confidants.)
The sounds of Iroquois languages are so non-European that any attempt to transcribe Iroquois words into everyday English is doomed. Two whites could hear an Oneida word and spell it so differently that you wouldn’t recognize it. This situation accounts for a lot of confusion in the general reader looking over historic sources.
In this book, we try to keep things simple. We try to render Iroquois words into pronounceable syllables and leave the technicalities to specialists.
IROQUOIS RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES
This is not a book about Iroquois religion or anything else we knew was sacred enough to be sensitive. Not only is that not our purpose, but, as a Mohawk friend said recently to me, “If it’s sacred, you don’t know it.” And coauthor Michael Bastine would not reveal it. But lines between spirituality and supernaturalism are not always easy to draw, and many developments in this book will be incomprehensible without a little primer.
The old Six Nations religion featured a head god often called the Good-Minded One. He had legions of helpers, including demigodly figures like the Thunder Beings. Not everyone agrees that he was a separate figure from the Creator, the Great Spirit. The two names are often used interchangeably.
The Good-Minded Spirit also had a powerful, ambiguous sibling with his own legion of helpers. You may see him referred to as “the Evil-Minded One,” and no one mistakes him for the Creator. Actually, his name in the various Iroquois languages could mean a number of things, including “circuitous” or “indirect.”
While the impulse of any westerner is to presume that this character was the Iroquois Devil, things might not be so clear-cut. We should remember that the writings of the Christian missionaries give us our first glimpse of the Iroquois, and they have shaded centuries of interpretation after. It would have been a reflex for the Jesuits to look for a Devil. But few world religious systems are as dramatically “dualist”—good guy vs. loathsome bad guy—as Christianity, and it would be remarkable if things with the Iroquois plugged right into any other model.
The Iroquois Evil-Minded One might be more Loki than Satan, more of a trickster than a lord of demons. He just doesn’t do things transparently and straight up. It’s his nature to be subtle, indirect, and devious. The natural world has room for a lot of things and beings like this. The Evil-Minded One might be the Bacchus/Dionysus figure of the classical world. He’s the opponent of order and clarity. In the Asian way of looking at things, he could represent the yin side of existence—diffuse and less definite but not evil. For the Iroquois he might even symbolize an alternative principle to the light and the domestic. He could represent the shadowy, forbidding, and craggy places in the landscape.
There were echelons of other supernatural beings, too, ranging from figures legendary to all Iroquois (like Little People and Great Flying Heads) to localized individual bogies that might have been unknown outside the folklore of a certain swamp or creek valley in the territory of a single nation. There were mortal culture heroes, too. Figures like Hiawatha and the Peacemaker were virtually deified,
