The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from Revolution through the Era of Removal

Preface

xi At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Indian claims to land and sovereign rights once again roil New York’s political waters. None has generated more controversy than the Oneida nation’s effort to recoup their 250,000-acre reservation in the center of the state, and their operation of a lucrative casino. Although similar developments bedevil states from Maine to California, the consternation seems greatest in the East. There, Indians were thought of as a “vanished race” whose continued existence was mostly in the form of artifacts buried in the ground. In the 1970s, however, eastern Natives forcefully asserted their presence and took up a prominent role in American Indian Movement activism. Natives posed hard questions about how Euro-Americans had acquired their land. Quite understandably, non-Indians responded with questions of their own. The first was, “Who are these people ?” They wondered how Natives could really have survived for centuries in a Euro-American landscape of fields and factories. Because historians have traditionally paid attention to Natives only when they were physically resisting white expansion, nothing in the traditional historical narratives of the region provided satisfactory explanations. Native Americans, by asserting their rights, disturbed quiet land titles as well as settled histories and static conceptions of “Indian-ness” and ethnicity in general. This book sheds light on these vexing issues by examining the history of the Oneidas during eight turbulent decades that began with the the American Revolution. In those years, the Oneidas weathered a trio of traumas: war, dispossession, and division. The Revolution devastated their villages, only to be followed by an invasion of white settlers who took control of Preface nearly all their lands. Traditional subsistence practices became impossible to sustain as Euro-American settlements proliferated. The Iroquois Confederacy fractured and ceased to be politically effective. Between 1775 and 1850, the Oneidas went from being an autonomous, powerful people in their ancestral homeland to being residents of disparate, politically exclusive reservation communities as far as nine hundred miles apart and surrounded by whites. The Oneidas’ physical, political, and emotional division persists to this day. But the distance traveled by the Oneidas during the three-quarters of a century examined here was not just geographic. Even those who remained in place were living in a world transformed. Culturally, ecologically, and demographically, their world changed more than at any time before or since. Oneidas of the post-Revolution generation were reluctant pioneers, undertaking more of the adaptations to colonized life than any other generation . Amid such wrenching change, maintaining continuity was itself a creative challenge. That process is at the heart of this book. When the Oneidas appear in American history books, it is usually in relation to their loyalty to the Patriot cause. The Oneidas distinguished themselves as the United States’ most important Indian allies. The character of this alliance, however, has been consistently misunderstood. Far too much emphasis has been placed on the influence of their missionary, Samuel Kirkland, and too little on the Oneidas’ main concern, protecting their land. Rather than blindly following their Yankee minister, or being won over by Patriot ideology, the Oneidas correctly understood the strength of the revolutionary movement and the threat it posed to them. Historians have also interpreted the American Revolution as an “Iroquois civil war,” but close examination of the Oneidas’ activities suggests otherwise. Although the Oneidas fought earnestly for the Patriots, they consciously avoided taking the lives of Indians on the other side of the conflict. These courtesies were reciprocated. Nevertheless, Oneida villages were devastated in the course of the con- flict, and their population declined by nearly a quarter. The Oneidas’ contributions to the cause of U.S. independence exceeded those of most Patriot communities. At the Battle of Oriskany, the Battle of Saratoga, and elsewhere , Oneida warriors and scouts were active on the Patriots’ behalf. But neither their contributions nor their sacrifices translated into a durable sense of obligation on the part of the new nation. The Oneidas were dispossessed of nearly their entire land base within five years of the war’s end. This and other postwar developments demonstrate clearly that the Revolution was, at least in part, a war of territorial expansion. The rush for lands in New York xii Preface Preface xiii that followed the war’s conclusion helps explain the Revolutionary motivations of rural Americans who made up the vast majority of...