Eric gansworth biography

     I am an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation which resides near the geographical heart of New York State, outside of the city of Syracuse. While tribally, this identity is mine because of the Haudenosaunee's matrilineal tradition, I am much more experientially allied with another tribe of the Haudenosaunee, having been born and raised on the Tuscarora Indian reservation, now in more P.C.

times called the Tuscarora Nation, just outside of Niagara Falls, in western New York. The story goes, according to my mother, and hers before her, and back to the beginning of our time in this place, that the Tuscaroras, on their migration from the Carolinas, were accompanied to their present location by two Onondaga women who joined the Tuscaroras after their membership acceptance into the Haudenosaunee; thus, at the formation of this piece of land's identity as the Tuscarora Nation, in the 1700s, my direct ancestor was present--one of two Onondaga