03/25/2026
Fort Neoheroka... The Fire and the Survival of Our People
What you’re looking at is not just a historical site.
This is Fort Neoheroka... also spelled Nooherooka... the place where one of the deadliest massacres of our people happened in 1713.
Archaeology shows this was not some weak village. This was a fortified stronghold. About 1½ acres, surrounded by high palisades, with interconnected bunkers and tunnels underneath, stocked with large amounts of food and supplies. Our people were prepared. Organized. Intentional.
In March 1713, Colonel James Moore laid siege to the fort.
He didn’t take it through strength alone. He mined the outer wall and set the fort on fire. Even after that first breach, it still took three more days before his men could fully overtake it.
That tells you everything about the resistance.
But what followed wasn’t a battle.
It was a massacre.
Babies. Children. Women... pregnant, young, and old... burned alive. The men were killed. Those who survived were captured and sold into slavery. By the end of the third day, more than a thousand of our people were gone. Women burning and still fighting for freedom.
This stands as one of the largest single killings in all of the so-called Indian Wars... more killed here than at Wounded Knee in 1890.
And it didn’t stop in 1713.
What happened here continued as a pattern for another 177 years, all the way through Wounded Knee and beyond. This was not random violence. This was a system.
After Neoheroka, thousands of Tuscarora were sold into slavery, and over 3,000 were forced from their homes. Some of our people moved north... into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York... joining the Lenni Lenape and the Six Nations.
There are still connections there today. The Ramapough Lenape trace descent not only from Lenape bands like the Hackensack, Tappan, Munsee, and Ramapo... but also from Tuscarora bloodlines.
Archaeologist C.A. Weslager documented that migrating Tuscarora families were taken in by the Lenni Lenape in the 1700s as they were being pushed west.
But that’s only part of the story.
Because many of us never left.
Some of our people escaped into the swamps. And understand this clearly... that wasn’t hiding. That was strategy. That’s where new Native communities formed, a few hundred years later reforming and recreating themselves under the names Waccamaw, Lumbee, Coharee, etc. ...
That’s where families adapted, blended when necessary, and survived. Some married into white society and others into black communities.
Most of the Tuscarora never left North Carolina.
I know that not from theory, but because I am a direct descendant still on this land... and I’m not alone.
Despite false narratives, misclassification, and even people repeating colonial thinking... we are still here in the Carolinas. Deep.
Don’t try to count us. You won’t be able to.
But you can count on this... we are still standing.
There are thousands of us across North Carolina, from the Piedmont to the coast, and into the mountains of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and even up into New York. We are rebuilding language, restoring ceremony, and honoring our ancestors through how we live.
And this didn’t start at Neoheroka.
The theft and enslavement of our people goes back even earlier. In the 1660s along the Cape Fear River, colonists kidnapped Native children from our communities. In response, our ancestors pushed them out so completely that no permanent settlement returned there for nearly 50 years, this was the Clarendon War.
In 1675, the Chowan were urged to drive colonists out of the Albemarle region. They fought for two years and were only defeated when colonists were resupplied with weapons.
About 30 years after that came Neoheroka.
And this pattern goes even further back and forward across this land:
1539 — Napituca Massacre in Florida against Timucuan people
1622 — Powhatan War (Jamestown) in Virginia
1623 — Wessagusset Massacre in Massachusetts
1637 — Mystic Massacre of the Pequot
1640 — Paspahegh Massacre in Virginia
1877 — Battle of the Big Hole in Montana
1911 — killings of Shoshone people in Nevada
Close to 200 massacres of Indigenous people have happened on this land since colonization began.
These weren’t isolated events. They were part of the same system that fueled wars like King Philip’s War, the Powhatan Wars, the Tuscarora War, the Yamasee War, and the Seminole Wars.
And even now... many of us are still fighting.
For land.
For water.
For our families.
For our right to exist as who we are.
For our culture.
For Earth.
Today, a monument stands at Neoheroka.
A 30-foot concrete circle surrounds the site. A 15-foot steel arch represents a longhouse entrance. On one side, a plaque shows a longhouse, corn, and h**p. On the other, a wampum belt.
Concrete wedges carry the names Tuscarora and Nooherooka.
Inside the circle, a brick path represents the nearby waterway. Stone-filled shapes mark the outline of the fort and a counterclockwise dance spiral. Six concrete tree stumps represent the Six Nations. A reflective steel mound and a tree stand opposite the entrance, representing the Tuscarora people.
But understand this clearly...
That is not just a monument.
That is ground where our people were burned alive.
And yet…
We are still here.
So when you look at these pictures, don't just see a memorial
See the truth
And understand why we are the way we are
