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Oneida The Origins of Man Introduction by Herbert S. Lewis Andrew Beechtree was one of approximately fifteen Wisconsin Oneida men and women who participated in a unique wpa project from 1938 through March 1942. These people were hired to collect and record linguistic, folkloric, historical, autobiographical , and ethnographic material from their own culture and society. Working under the direction of university students who acted as supervisors or foremen, they were given the opportunity to write down their own accounts and to record those given to them by their relatives, friends, and neighbors. Conceived and begun as the Oneida Language and Folklore Project (see Hauptman 1981), by the time Andrew Beechtree wrote down this story in March 1941, it had been converted into the Oneida Ethnological Study. This enterprise included recording history, autobiography, and accounts of contemporary Oneida life in all its aspects. All the participants were bilingual speakers of both Oneida and English, and those taking part in the language study were taught to write down accounts phonemically in the Oneida language and to analyze them for translation. (They were trained by Floyd Lounsbury, the project’s first supervisor, who at the time was an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.) For the ethnological study they usually wrote directly in English, as Andrew Beechtree seems to have done with his account of the creation of the world. Like most of the participants in the project, Andrew Beechtree had received his education at boarding schools for the training of Indians. He attended schools on the Wisconsin Oneida reservation, in Tomah, Wisconsin, and the famous Carlisle Indian Boarding School in central Pennsylvania. He completed twelve years of study, but as he points out ruefully in an autobiographical account, Carlisle was stronger on training in the ‘‘practical arts,’’ work, and extra-curricular activity than it was on academics. His own special subjects were carpentry and ‘‘mechanical arts,’’ which prepared him to begin work at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1917. Like many of his contemporaries, he worked at various jobs in industry (in Detroit, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and elsewhere) until the start of the Great Depression in 1929, after which he was laid off, could not find work, and depended on wpa projects and relief for most of his living. the origins of man 533 Keenly aware of the limitations of his education, Andrew Beechtree evidently did a lot of reading on his own, and he was pleased to be working on the wpa project, which offered him an opportunity to learn, speculate, and write, as well as to earn enough money to scrape by during the Depression. This narrative is the product of his researches and of his appreciation for both the Oneida and the English language.1 the wisconsin oneidas The Oneidas of Wisconsin are members of one branch of the Oneida Nation of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. About 1822 their ancestors left New York for the area southwest of Green Bay, Wisconsin, impelled by the disturbed conditions in their New York State homeland and induced by the offer of money with which to buy land from the Menominees. By the time they migrated, most of the Oneidas were Christian, primarily Episcopalian or Methodist. Most could not speak English at that time, but they attended church services and heard the sermons of white missionary preachers translated into their language by skilled Oneida interpreters. By the time this account of the origins of man was written down, the Oneidas had been Christians for more than 150 years and their lives, activities, and thought were deeply influenced by their new faith. It is no surprise that biblical and Christian elements and language readily enter this narrative. On the other hand, much of the story has its genesis in Iroquois tradition that predates the coming of the Europeans to their land. It appears that by 1941 this tale was not viewed as a source of power, nor did it have deep meaning to the Oneidas of Wisconsin at that time. As Beechtree notes at the start, ‘‘There are now not many Oneida interested enough in their race to retain this old legend.’’ By then few young people were interested in the Oneida language or traditions.2 (This does not mean, however, that they did not regard themselves fully as Indians or Iroquois; they certainly did. But they were more interested in modern ways of being Oneida, doing such things as singing Christian hymns...

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