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Forgotten Allies
The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution
By Joseph T. Glatthaar, James Kirby Martin Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006 Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-70718-7
CHAPTER 1
The People of the Standing Stone
They called themselves Onyota'ak:á:. Early Dutch settlers referred to them as either Maquas, the same term settlers used for neighboring Mohawk Indians, or Sinnekens, a composite word for various Native Americans living west of the Mohawks and later applied to the largest of those tribes, the Senecas—all of them members of the Iroquois Confederacy. The French who penetrated up the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes opted for the expression Onneiouts, a derivation of the Huron name for them. In time, English settlers tinkered with both and came up with the word Oneidas.
The image of the name Onyota'ak:á:, or "People of the Standing Stone," conveyed the impression of endurance and permanence. Like the boulder that weathers nature's storms century after century, the Oneidas possessed a lasting character, even in seasons of hardship. They perceived themselves as a bastion of stability amid ever-swirling gusts of change, known for constancy and reliability.
The Oneidas drew from this stone insights into the flow of human existence. Because they believed beings from the spirit world imbued all objects, the concept of the standing stone provided a nexus between ancestors gone by and descendants to come, always reminding the Oneidas to draw from the past in order to confront the present and boldly envision the future. Generations came and went; the boulder defied the limitations of time.
Along with the rock's symbolism, the tradition of storytelling served succeeding generations of Oneidas, becoming a vital link from the past to the present and into the future. After the first hard freeze each autumn, the Oneidas gathered night after night to listen to the retelling of their Creation Narrative and other sacred stories. A few specially selected individuals, identified in their youth for keen intelligence and sharp memories and then trained at great length by their elders, were keepers of this flame. The patriarchs emphasized the importance of accurate content and precise details, since the stories not only preserved the Oneidas' heritage but also offered guideposts for their way of life. Individual expression for these "historians" lay in the style of their presentation, their intonation of particular words or passages, and their ability to connect one saga component to the next.
The Creation Narrative, which all Iroquois nations shared, represents a richly nuanced saga about the struggle between good and evil. The story begins with a village in the Sky World consisting of single-family bark houses and focuses on a female known as Sky Woman. Through magical means, she becomes pregnant. Her jealous husband fumes with suspicion, and in a rage he shoves her down a hole in the ground. As Sky Woman plummets through the air, some birds catch her. Other animals plaster mud on the back of a turtle, and the birds place Sky Woman there. As she walks about, soil grows on the turtle's back, creating Earth.
Sky Woman gives birth to a daughter. In the fullness of time, the daughter comes of age and begins entertaining suitors. None interests her except for one, whom she marries. Her husband turns out to be the turtle in disguise. She soon becomes pregnant with twins. In their mother's womb, the twins argue over how to enter the world. One child, the Good Twin, called Skyholder, comes into the world in the conventional manner, but the Evil Twin bursts through his mother's side, killing her. The Evil Twin then convinces his grandmother, Sky Woman, that his brother was responsible for their mother's death. In her grief, Sky Woman banishes her good grandson, Skyholder.
Fortunately for Skyholder, his father rescues him. As a dutiful parent, Turtle instructs him in how to use his magical powers for good and to create wonderful things, including human beings. His brother and grandmother, however, undo this work by inventing dangerous animals, virulent diseases, killing frosts, and treacherous waterfalls to impede travel.
Ultimately, the terrible struggle between good and evil takes place, a titanic contest for supremacy between the twins. Skyholder wins the battle, and as his brother sinks into the earth, he becomes the Evil Spirit. Because Skyholder cannot undo the harmful activities of his brother and grandmother, he instead teaches human beings various ceremonies designed to honor the spirit world and ward off evil.
Before Skyholder finishes his work and enters the spirit world, he completes two more deeds. He joins forces with the animals to pilfer his mother's head from Sky Woman and place it in the sky as the sun. Then, while inspecting his creations, he encounters Hadu?i?, a grotesque hunchback who is the master of the winds and the sponsor of disease. In a contest of power, Skyholder shifts a mountain while holding his breath, which Hadu?i? bet him he could not do. Since Skyholder wins, must help rid the world of the Evil Twin's monsters and cure disease. creates the Falseface Society to train individuals to wear a mask and impersonate him to heal illness. In return for his commitment to share his knowledge, tobacco must be continuously offered to Hadu?i?. With Skyholder's work done for the time being, he and Sky Woman ascend into the Sky World, vowing to return at the end of time.
The Creation Narrative offers hints of the world in earlier times. As the Wisconsin glacier receded northward from New York some twelve thousand to fourteen thousand years ago, it left behind a massive sea, Lake Iroquoia, perhaps twice the size of Lake Ontario. Tundra surrounded this lake, and small groups of migratory peoples hunted roaming herds of caribou. Over thousands of years, as the glacier continued to retreat, the water supply to Lake Iroquoia diminished, and its banks contracted. Fresh ground had indeed sprung from the turtle's back. As the weather warmed and the growing season lengthened, the frozen ground melted, and pine forests began to sprout everywhere. Caribou followed the tundra, as did their hunters, who, around nine thousand years ago, left the region in pursuit of their game.
The invasion of the hardwoods commenced around the same time. By about 1000 B.C.E., deciduous timber dominated much of the landscape, with oaks, chestnuts, and poplars taking hold in selected areas. Huge sycamore, walnut, and butternut trees sprouted on islands and some bottomland; hickories, elms, and maples staked claim to many of the more fertile areas; and pines and hemlocks secured sandy, barren spots.
With the hardwoods came an assortment of wild animals, both herbivores and omnivores. Among other species, deer, elk, moose, black bears, and turkeys began to flourish. Human beings in search of game as a stable source of food pressed into the region as well. An abundance of meat, supplemented by fish, berries, fruits, and other plant life, supported the proliferation of a flourishing indigenous human population.
Because much of the available game did not follow substantial migratory patterns, hunters no longer had to travel long distances to obtain meat. Also, by learning to preserve quantities of food underground, the populace could now remain in the same location for longer periods of time. Agricultural techniques relating to the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash developed by around A.D. 1000 and likewise supported the establishment of semipermanent settlements. Known as the "Three Sisters," these crops became a mainstay of life in Iroquoia.
With reliable sources of food, villages started to expand in size and consolidate for defense against unfriendly neighbors. By around A.D. 1100, the various bands inhabiting the region at the time of European contact began to take shape. Tribes formed, and subtle language differences became more pronounced but not so extensive as to prevent verbal communication outside the group. To the east were the Maquas, or Mohawks, the "People of the Flint." Their immediate western neighbors were the Oneidas. Next resided the Onondagas, the "People of the Mountain," then the Cayugas, the "People at the Landing," and finally the Senecas, the "People of the Great Hill."
The Five Nations most likely banded together to form a league sometime during the latter half of the fifteenth century. Initially, their goal was to guarantee peace among themselves by resolving disputes through discussion rather than violent acts. In time, this pact blossomed into an alliance, which enabled them to draw warriors from all five nations during selective crises, thereby harnessing unparalleled strength to conquer their enemies. By confederating, the Five Nations became a powerful and influential indigenous force east of the Mississippi River. Their war parties sometimes ranged as far away as Canada, the Carolinas, and the Great Lakes region.
Iroquois storytellers described the formation of the league as the work of a Mohawk named Deganawi:dah, assisted by an Oneida named Odatshehdeh (Quiver Bearer). During precarious times, Deganawi:dah worked to end strife. First securing the cooperation of his own people, he then traveled to Oneida territory, where he convinced Odatshehdeh to assist him. Odatshehdeh then persuaded his fellow Oneidas to join in the league of peace. In subsequent years, he and Deganawi:dah visited the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, gaining their consent as well.
The Five Nations assumed the name Hodinonhsyo:ni, translated as "People of the Long House." The term referred to Iroquois dwellings, which provided living quarters for an extended family. Aptly, the phrase imparted an image of the Five Nations as components of a single family of Iroquois peoples combined under an extended roof. English settlers called the Five Nations "Confederates." Thus, the combination of terms resulted in the title Iroquois Confederacy.
With their combined strength, the Five Nations expanded their landholdings over the next couple of centuries. After many wars, they vanquished their neighbors and dominated an area from the Hudson River in the East to Lake Erie in the West, and from the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario in Canada southward into modern-day Pennsylvania. In time, the Iroquois also claimed lands out into the Ohio Valley–Great Lakes region and down toward the Chesapeake and Delaware bays.
Each nation had a magnetic attachment with its own territory. As an Oneida sachem named Kanaghwaes explained in the early 1770s, "[t]he Great Spirit gave us our lands." Tribal domains represented the home of passing generations, a region now filled with not only deities but also the spirits of these ancestors. They imbued the trees, the waterways, the animals, the sky—all objects, animate and inanimate—with their essence. For the living Oneidas, their homeland served as a kind of longhouse stretching into the past, a spiritual haven for those who had come before and whose flesh was forever gone.
The Oneidas constructed villages and homes for the comfort and security of their people. A Dutch colonist named Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert offered the first recorded description of an Oneida village in December 1634. Van den Bogaert and two comrades trudged from Fort Orange (Albany) through various Mohawk hamlets to the Oneida town. This settlement lived up to the Dutch depiction of Iroquois villages as "castles." (The English employed the same term, which reflected the fortress-like appearance of Iroquois towns.) Communal fields cleared for spring cultivation lay outside a high wooden fence, or palisade, that protected the village. A three-and-a-half-foot opening offered one of only two entries through the two rows of palisades. Above the gateway dangled three scalps, trophies from a recent raid. On the opposite side, another opening through the palisade was about half as wide. In crises, the residents could seal off these gaps quickly.
The village rested on a commanding hill. Van den Bogaert marched 767 paces around the palisade, which meant that nearly 37,000 square yards of land contained the 66 longhouses the Dutch visitor counted. The longhouses, decorated with paintings of animals, consisted of birch and elm bark covering a frame of saplings. They measured up to one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet wide, with high ceilings and removable roof panels to permit smoke to escape and sunlight to illuminate the interior. Inside the longhouses, the Oneidas divided the space into compartments, one for each nuclear family. Family living quarters consisted of platform beds, shelves for storage, and a fireplace.
Every couple of decades, soil depletion, sanitary problems, and insect infestation compelled Oneida villagers to relocate. In 1677, an English observer visited a community of Oneidas and commented that they had recently resettled at a new site, apparently not far from the one van den Bogaert had described four decades earlier. As at the former location, the Oneidas lived in one community containing about one hundred longhouses and a double stockade for defense, "but little ground cleared, so thatt they are forced to send to the Onondagoes to buy corne." During relocation, men selected and designed the site and cut and hauled heavy timber, while women took responsibility for the children and for moving household goods. Both sexes labored at the dismantling of buildings and their reconstruction at the new village.
The longhouse represented much more than a functional shelter. Each one provided living quarters for a family lineage, called an ohwachira, the basic unit in the Oneida and Iroquois social structure. An elderly matron almost always headed each family lineage, which consisted of all her direct female descendants and their families. When a man married a woman, he usually moved into a compartment in her longhouse. His wife, her sisters and brothers, and her mother's sisters assumed virtually all the burden of raising his children, which secured strong ties with the lineage. The importance of the mother-daughter relationship remained intact, and powerful bonds also formed between sons and mother's brothers. Usually, the father functioned as an uncle might in most European societies.
Like Skyholder's experience when his grandmother cast him out and Turtle cared for him, the blood father assumed responsibility for the well-being of his sons. A son, likewise, had to fulfill obligations to his father's family. When his father's mother called on him to join a raiding party to alleviate grief over the death of her offspring, Oneida society expected him to participate.
The family lineage established bonds and obligations that lasted for lifetimes. The ohwachira offered a communal training ground for the development of such essential skills as hunting and fishing or basket making and cooking, and also socialized individuals in the customs and beliefs of the Iroquois. The lineage resolved feuds and aided the grieving process by seeking various forms of compensation for the loss of loved ones. Within a mother's extended household, a child mastered the art of gift giving and the practice of honoring and respecting other people. The lineage also tutored young people in cross obligations, called reciprocity, such as those duties that sons had in relation to their father's family and that a father's family had in relation to sons.
Lineages served as a fundamental building block for affiliations with clans. According to Iroquois legend, Deganawi:dah explained to Odatshehdeh that his people had been segmented into three clans—Turtle, Wolf, and Bear—and that each clan consisted of three extended family lineages. Each lineage held a sachem title, making nine in the Mohawk Nation. The Oneidas adopted the same structure. They established three clans—Turtle, Wolf, and Bear—with three extended family lineages composing each clan. As their Mohawk neighbors had done, the Oneidas designated nine hereditary sachemships as civil leaders in tribal affairs.
As with families, clans were matrilineal in organization. At one time, these lineages likely came from the same female ancestor, but after hundreds of years, the Iroquois could no longer track that common connection. Yet clan members still acted as if they were related, when in reality their bloodlines had at best become very diluted.
Clans had several responsibilities. They sponsored all sorts of ceremonial events, from harvest and fishing feasts to funeral rites. They also helped individuals interpret and act out their dreams. Each individual possessed a set of personal names that the clan matron, or head female, controlled. A child would receive an initial name at birth and then a second name at puberty, the latter of which remained with that person for a lifetime.
Even though individuals established powerful ties with their specific clan, most had deep and binding relationships with persons from other clans as well. One of the clan's most important functions was to ensure exogamy—the custom of marrying outside the clan—thereby cementing one clan and lineage with another. In the Oneida Nation, a person from a large family could have a spouse and in-laws from all three clans.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forgotten Allies by Joseph T. Glatthaar, James Kirby Martin. Copyright © 2006 Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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