The Tuscarora Chiefs’ Descendancy project
The Chiefs’ Descendancy Project honors and documents the DIRECT living descendants of the hereditary leaders who guided the Tuscarora Nation from our temporary home at Indian Woods Reservation. These chiefs held steadfast to the Great Law and to the survival of our people through the most trying eras of division, reconstruction and removal of our Council fire from Indian Woods to our new home of present day Robeson and adjacent counties.
We, their descendants, carry forward their vision for a strong, unified Tuscarora Nation in North Carolina. Our lineages continue unbroken from Tuscarora War Chief John “Captain Jack” Braveboy (Rakwatíčhayęʔ), Chief Samuel Bridgers, Chief Billie Roberts, Chief James Blount, Chief John Rogers, Chief William Pugh, Chief John Smith, and Chief Samuel Smith, whose leadership at Indian Woods ensured that the Tuscarora Nation would endure upon its own land.
Through this project, SUN seeks to reaffirm these ancestral lines of leadership, to preserve the records and oral histories that connect us to them and to ensure that the authority and continuity of the Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina remain recognized, protected and respected.
We honor our chiefs not as relics of the past, but as the living foundation upon which our sovereignty and identity stand today.
Skarù·ręʔ Language: the eternal voice of our people
The Tuscarora language Revitalization Project is integral to our identity. It carries our worldview, our humor, our grief, our ceremonial life and our laws of relationship to land and one another. When a language falls silent, a people’s unique way of understanding the world is diminished. For the Skarù·ręʔ, language preservation is not an academic exercise – it is survival. From early Tuscarora language revivalists such as Robert Locklear and Micah Sampson, to Runęhkwáʔčhęʔ Duane Brayboy, who has served as Tuscarora language instructor since 2015, our people have worked tirelessly to keep our language breathing in daily life. Every time we speak Tuscarora, teach it to a child or place it back into ceremony and story, we are reclaiming what colonization sought to erase. Every breath spoken in our language is an act of decolonization, continuity and self-determination.
For the past ten years, our Tuscarora language classes have been taught entirely on a volunteer basis.
Despite the significant time, expertise, and preparation required for advanced linguistic instruction, these classes have been offered freely to the community out of commitment to cultural survival, not compensation.
With appropriate funding, we can expand these efforts, support additional learners, and sustain this essential work for future generations.
“In this new dark age, so many natives are looking to the past, wishing the ancestors could answer our questions and while we cannot call the ancestors back, if we speak their language, we can see the world through their eyes and move forward to find the answers with that knowledge.” ~ Runęhkwáʔčhęʔ Duane Brayboy
The Tuscarora Storytelling & animated cultural preservation project
Through the SUN Storytelling & Animated Cultural Preservation Project, we are weaving together the oldest knowledge of the Skarù·ręʔ people with the newest tools of the modern world. These animated short films are more than creative works – they are acts of remembrance, revival and reclamation.
Each story carries traditional teachings, historical memory, ancestral imagery and authentic Tuscarora language, allowing us to preserve what was nearly taken from us and pass it forward in a form that children, families and future generations can hold onto. These videos breathe life back into our old villages, our worldview and our ways of speaking, while honoring the responsibility our ancestors placed in us to safeguard their wisdom.
By blending cultural realism, historical accuracy, and the Tuscarora language, these animated teachings become a bridge – connecting the elders to the youth, the past to the future and the heart of our people to those yet to come. This ongoing project ensures that Skarù·ręʔ identity will continue to shine long after we are gone, carried forward in images, stories and voices that reflect who we truly are.
© 2025 Skarù·ręʔ Urihwaká·yę̀·ʔ Nyakwarihwatù·ręh (S.U.N.) Historical & Preservation Society.
All rights reserved. Cultural and language materials protected.
No AI training or dataset use permitted.