Nikonha

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Nikonha, also known as Waskiteng and Mosquito, lived around 1765 to 1871. He was the last full-blooded speaker of Tutelo, a Siouan language once spoken in Virginia. He is said to have died at about 106 years old at Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation in Ontario, where his people had moved with the Cayuga during the American Revolutionary War.

In 1870, ethnologist Horatio Hale visited Nikonha to learn about the languages of mixed-heritage people at the Reserve. Hale described Nikonha as an impressive old man who remained lively and intelligent, with a wrinkled, smiling face and white hair. Nikonha spoke little beyond the Cayuga language at home, having learned it in youth. He said his father was a Tutelo chief named Onusowa and that his mother had died when he was a child; he was raised by his maternal uncle in a matrilineal kinship system. The Tutelo people had gradually migrated north from Virginia.

When Nikonha was about 14, around 1779, the Tutelo lived in the Cayuga village of Coreorgonel near Ithaca, New York. During the Sullivan Expedition in the American Revolution, the village was attacked, and many Cayuga and Tutelo villages were destroyed. The Tutelo survivors fled north with the Cayuga and other Iroquois, eventually settling on land granted to them by the Crown at the Grand River in Ontario.

Nikonha served with the British and their allies in the War of 1812. His wife was Cayuga.

Hale collected about 100 words of Tutelo from Nikonha. This, along with other notes, helped confirm that Tutelo is a Siouan language, related to Dakota and Hidatsa. There were historically other Siouan-speaking peoples in the southeastern interior of what is now the United States.