What you're looking at in the pictures is the area where the U.S. Colonial Europeans in 1713 engaged in a three day seige of Fort Neoheroka where they murdered Indigenous people by burning Babies, Children & Women(pregnant and old women), they were burned them alive and of course the men were murdered too...& they sold whoever they could capture into slavery.
At the end of the third day, almost a thousand had been massacred.
This is the single largest killing in a particular battle, of all the Indian Wars, more killed than Wounded Knee which was another tragic massacre later on in 1890.
From the 1713 Tuscarora massacre, the Colonial Europeans continued this same act of genocide for 177 more years which was the year of 1890 the Wounded Knee massacre..
During the 1713 Fort Neoheroka Massacre, some of our people escaped, we hid in the swamps while some relocated after the war in 1714 up north in Pennsylvania & New Jersey among the Lenni Lenape and six Nations in New York.
The Ramapough Lenape Indian Nation claim descent from the Lenape, whose regional bands included the Hackensack, Tappan, Rumachenanck/Haverstroo, Munsee/Minisink, and Ramapo people and they also claim descent from Tuscarora bloodlines.
When I asked Chief Perry if this was correct, he agreed.
The archeologist C.A. Weslager noted that the Delaware were joined in the eighteenth century by some migrating Tuscarora families migrating from the Carolinas.
They were welcomed by the Algonquin-speaking Lenni Lenape tribe who were being pushed west from New York City into western New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Most of the Tuscarora never left North Carolina because leaving our traditional homeland was not an option.
I know this because I'm a direct descendant still living on our land and I'm not even close to being alone.
Contrary to some false reports, lies, ignorance and colonial minded Indians who act more like their colonial father's than Real Indian People, we are still here in the Carolinas, deep.
Don't try to count us because we are too numerous to count but you can count on us to step up and be who creator created us to be.
Thousands of us here in North Carolina living in different communities, relearning our language, ceremonies, etc, honouring our ancestors through our resilience and determination to be free people.
We are scattered from the Piedmont to the coast and you'll even find us in the Mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and New York.
The theft and enslavement of Indigenous people in North America started with my ancestors in one of the earliest Indian-white conflicts occurring along the Cape Fear River in the 1660s when colonists of Clarendon County kidnapped some Cape Fear Indian children.
In retaliation, we forced the colony to abandon the region. No other permanent white settlement was made along the lower Cape Fear for nearly half a century.
A few years later, in 1675, Virginia Indians urged the Chowan tribe to drive the English colonists from the Albemarle settlements.
This the Chowan attempted, but both sides were so evenly matched that the conflict dragged on for two years.
The Chowan were defeated only when a ship loaded with arms and ammunition arrived to supply the colonists.
Around 30 years later would mark the time of the Ft. Neeharooka massacre of the Tuscarora.
These Indian massacres started in 1500's specifically, 1539 between the resisting Timucuan warriors & Hernando de Soto in the Napituca Massacre of Florida.
They continued through the 1600's in Virginia and Massachusett:
The 1640 with the Paspahegh Massacre of Virginia
The 1622 Powhatan(Pamunkey)
Jamestown Massacre, Virgina
The 1623 Wessagusset Massacre, Massachusetts
The 1637 Wethersfield Attack and Mystic Massacre of the Pequot
The 1877 Battle of the Big Hole, Montana all the way to;
The 1911 Last Massacre when an American posse killed some Shoshone in Nevada.
There has been close to 200 massacres of Indigenous people since the Colonial invasion started that sparked some major Eastern Woodland wars; the King Philips war, Powhatan war, Tuscarora war, Yamassee war and the Seminoles war.
Many of us are still fighting to this very day for autonomy, for land, for water, for family, fighting to exist, fighting for culture and for earth mother.
Read more about Fort Neoheroka:
Fort Neoheroka 300 Years Later – Tuscarora Commemorative Monument
https://nativeheritageproject.com/2013/03/26/fort-neoheroka-300-years-later-tuscarora-commemorative-monument/
