Seven Years Under Its Own Name

When Tuscarora refugees first arrived in Haudenosaunee territory in the early eighteenth century, other nations offered to absorb them individually: Oneida, Onondaga and Seneca each proposed taking Tuscarora families in as adoptees into their own existing structures, a path that would have ended Tuscarora as a distinct people within the Confederacy. William Fenton's political history of the confederacy records that the Tuscarora resisted this path for roughly seven years, choosing instead to be recognized in 1722 as a sixth nation in their own right, under Oneida sponsorship, rather than dissolve into any one of the five founding nations. The choice cost them the fifty permanent chief titles the five founders had divided among themselves at the Confederacy's establishment; Tuscarora sits on the Younger Brothers' side of the Grand Council without one of its own, represented through the Oneida relationship that had sponsored its admission in the first place.

Tuscarora, the nation's own language, continues to be distinguished from the other five Confederacy languages by the centuries of separation that preceded the migration north, and the Tuscarora Nation of New York, near Niagara Falls, maintains its own identity distinct from Tuscarora descendants in North Carolina who never made the journey. The Longhouse religion and Christianity are both practiced among Tuscarora communities today, as across the wider Confederacy, and ceremonial and medicine society knowledge is restricted to initiated members rather than set out for a general readership.