David Cusick

David Cusick (c. 1780 – 1840) was a Tuscarora artist and the author of David Cusick's Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1827). This is an early (if not the first) account of Native American history and myth, written and published in English by a Native American. He was the leading figure of the Iroquois Realist Movement.

Biography

Cusick was born between 1780 and 1785, probably on Oneida land in upstate New York. He was Tuscarora. His father, Nicholas Cusick (1756–1840), was a Revolutionary War veteran and an interpreter for the Congregationalist mission to the Seneca. He most likely attended a mission school where he learned to read and write English. David's younger brother, Dennis Cusick, was a watercolor painter, and together the two brothers help establish what the critic William C. Sturvetant has called the Iroquois realist school of painting. David served in the War of 1812, during which his village was burned by the British.

He was a physician, painter, and student of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) oral tradition. He is thought to have died around 1840.

Book

Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations "was the first Native-authored, Native-printed, and Native-copyrighted text" in what is now the United States; Cusick published the first edition of Sketches as a 28-page pamphlet at Lewiston, New York, in 1825 or 1827. He re-issued it the following year with additional text and four of his own engravings. The Sketches was republished in 1848 and again in 1892. Cusick printed at least some editions with his own money. Sketches was a source for several 19th-century works on Iroquois oral tradition.