Tutelo Erotic

The Tutelo were a Siouan-speaking people of the Virginia piedmont, living in the valleys below the Blue Ridge near present-day Roanoke when English explorers reached them in 1671, and gone from that country within two generations. Tutelo is what the Iroquois called them and what the colonists wrote down; among themselves the word was closer to Yesan, which meant simply the people. They were one of a cluster of related Virginia Siouan groups, along with the Saponi, Occaneechi, Monacan and Manahoac, all speaking dialects near enough to be mutually intelligible and all caught in the same vise: Iroquois war parties from the north, English settlement from the east. Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 broke the Occaneechi trading monopoly on the Roanoke and scattered the survivors south into the Carolina piedmont. In 1714 Governor Spotswood gathered the remnant peoples at Fort Christanna in southern Virginia, where a schoolmaster taught their children and the colony collected a buffer against raids. That arrangement lasted only a few years. A 1722 treaty at Albany finally made peace with the Six Nations, and the Tutelo took the only door open to them: they moved north, first to the Susquehanna, and in 1753 were formally adopted by the Cayuga as a nation within the Iroquois Confederacy.

Their town at the head of Cayuga Lake, Coreorgonel, burned in 1779 when the Sullivan expedition swept through Iroquois country, and the survivors went with their hosts to the Grand River in Ontario. That is where the language outlived the homeland. In 1870 Horatio Hale sat down at Grand River with a man named Nikonha, then roughly 106 and the last fluent speaker, and took down what vocabulary he could; Nikonha died the following year. Tutelo was the easternmost Siouan language ever recorded, a relative of Biloxi and Ofo and a far cousin of Lakota, spoken in country otherwise ringed by Algonquian and Iroquoian tongues, and most of what is known of it comes from that visit and from later notes taken among Cayuga who still remembered fragments. The ceremonial life lasted longer than the speech. The Tutelo spirit adoption rite, a night-long observance in which the spirit of someone who has died is settled and a living relative is raised up in their place, was still performed in the Grand River longhouses when Frank Speck documented it in the 1930s and 1940s, sung in a language most participants no longer spoke. Descendants are counted today at Six Nations, and in Virginia and North Carolina the related Monacan and Occaneechi-Saponi communities have taken up Tutelo-Saponi in language revival work.