Society and culture
Like the other Iroquois, the Cayuga were people of the longhouse. Longhouses were oval-shaped dwellings made from wood and bark. They were large enough to house several families.
The Cayuga's homeland provided them with a varied diet. Men hunted animals and birds in the forests and fished in the rivers. Women grew fields of squash and beans, but their most important crop was corn (maize). Each year, when the corn ripened, everyone celebrated at the Green Corn Ceremony.
Representatives of eight clans formed the council of village chiefs that ruled the Cayuga. Individuals belonged to the clans of their mothers. The tribe also sent ten chiefs to the Great Council, which had power over the whole Iroquois Confederacy. Besides the Cayuga, the original Iroquois tribes were the Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. The Cayuga and Oneida were smaller than the other tribes and were called the league's “younger brothers.”
History
The Cayuga were visited by the French priest René Ménard in 1656. As fur trading partners and military allies, they remained closer to the French than the other Iroquois tribes, who generally favored the English.
Throughout the late 17th century, the Iroquois fought and won many wars with other Indian groups. The Cayuga took into their tribe many people from the tribes they defeated, including the Erie and the Huron.
Like most of the other Iroquois, the Cayuga sided with the British in the American Revolution. When the United States won, Americans gradually took over the Cayuga homeland. Many of the tribe went to Canada, where they settled on the Six Nations Indian Reserve. Others traveled with people of other Iroquois tribes first to Ohio, then to Oklahoma. This group became known as the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma. Still other Cayuga moved into Seneca communities in western New York.
In the 1970s, the Cayuga sued New York State for lands taken in the 18th and 19th centuries. A U.S. district judge in October 2001 ordered the state to pay about $248 million to the tribe. By the end of the 20th century, there were about 2,000 Cayuga, with half living in the United States and half in Canada.