Skarureh

Skarureh, better known as Tuscarora, is the Iroquoian language of the Tuscarora people; together with its close Virginian cousin Nottoway, it forms a peripheral branch of Northern Iroquoian. Its name means the hemp people or the long-shirt people, and before European contact its speakers lived in the coastal plain of North Carolina, farming in matrilineal clans.

Defeat in the Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1713 against British colonists and their native allies broke their power: most surviving Tuscarora drifted north over several generations into Pennsylvania and New York, where in 1722 the Oneida sponsored their admission as the sixth nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Their kinsmen the Nottoway remained in Virginia, where their language dwindled; nearly all that was preserved of it comes from a vocabulary taken down in 1820 from an elderly Nottoway woman named Edith Turner.