Erasure and Tuscarora Resilience in Colonial North Carolina

In the wake of their victory in the Tuscarora War (1711–15), English settlers forced the Tuscarora Indians of eastern North Carolina, along with the Meherrin, Core, Chowan, Mattamuskeet, Neuse, Hatteras, Bay River, and White Oak River Indians, to become colonial tributaries with assigned land reserves. As tributaries, these Native tribes had special duties and rights recognized by the colony, but they also had to navigate a new world thrust upon them by the colonial government and white settlers.

Historian David La Vere argues that through this devious sleight of hand, the colony erased these groups’ designation as “Indians,” eliding their official, documented existence. The paper genocide of these Native peoples of eastern North Carolina reinforced the growing binary of Black and white society with no place for Native Americans. La Vere traces the process of racialization for both the Native American and wider North Carolinian populations in the decades that followed the war, using previously undiscovered material to chart the dehumanization that occurred as well as the repercussions of the tributary policies that were still felt nearly 200 years after the conflict.