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

1: A Place and a People in a Time of Change: The Oneida Homeland in the 1760s

1 By 1765, over 130 years of direct contact with Europeans had wrought deep and disturbing changes in Oneida lives. Although the most devastating effects of imported diseases such as smallpox and influenza had passed, the Oneidas remained vulnerable, and their population of approximately one thousand was probably less than half their number at the time of contact . After more than a century of trade with whites, the Oneidas and the other five nations of the Iroquois League had shifted to European goods to fulfill the basic necessities. While deerskin remained the material of choice for moccasins and leggings, Indians had adopted European broadcloth and blankets for most of their clothing needs. Tools of wood, bone, and stone had been replaced by metal knives, axes, pots, pans, guns, and other implements of Euro-American manufacture. The supply of furs for trade and meat for subsistence depended on metal traps and firearms that required gunpowder and repair by a blacksmith. Tribal identity, however, continued to be based in the land. The Oneida landscape was a repository of their history , beliefs, and values. Specific locales were associated with stories of the creation of the world, right action, and history. Far more than a mere setting , their territory added meaning to their actions. The Oneida landscape was not inert, for the Iroquois endowed rocks, rivers, streams, mountains, and even the wind with personhood, the potential for independent action. Indeed, the Oneidas took their name, the People of the Standing Stone, from a certain rock they said followed them under its own power whenever they relocated their council fire. When placed in a tree, it was believed to improve their fortunes in war. Iroquois creation 1 A Place and a People in a Time of Change The Oneida Homeland in the 1760s 2 Chapter 1 stories related that the world they inhabited sat atop a turtle’s back. It grew through the agency of the muskrat and other swimmer people who had assembled it in the first instance for the benefit of Sky Woman, so that she might have a place to land when she fell from the Upper World. Because the land itself was a powerful, living being, stories of the creation could be related safely by storytellers only during winter nights, when the earth itself slept. But Oneidas were not always respectful. In 1744, the Oneida Shickellamy addressed a recalcitrant patch of frozen earth: “My Friend! I and my companion want to stay here to-night, and you must let me drive these stakes into the ground; so give way a little, or I will dig you out of the ground and throw you into the fire.” Rivers, protecting hills, and a plenitude of game animals all attested to the activities of Sapling, the son of Sky Woman’s daughter. Benevolent Sapling strove to make Iroquoia a more comfortable home for the mortal humans who would populate the creation. Mostly through his agency their landscape possessed all the necessary means of subsistence, while poison fruit, gnarled trees, and contrary currents all attested to the activities of his rival twin brother, Flint. Thus, features of the landscape could evoke narratives on the mythical world and social norms regarding proper conduct. Sodeahlowanake , meaning “thick-necked giant” (present-day Oxford, N.Y.), likely referred to the “Stonish Giants” who had threatened to destroy all the peoples of Iroquoia in the distant past, according to the nineteenth-century Tuscarora historian David Cusick, who had grown up among the Oneidas. Underscoring the belief that their world existed on a fragile plane between others, the Iroquois regarded caves, lakes, and mountains as places where contact with the supernatural was most likely to occur. Indeed, one white man who had grown up among the Oneidas recalled that they “used to show the precise spot of ground, a small hollow, where they said their ancestors came up.” The Oneidas could traverse their lands from east to west in a day. The travel time from Kanonwalohale to the southern periphery was about two days; all the way to the northernmost reaches along the St. Lawrence would have been about three. The Oneida landscape was one of considerable topographical diversity. It included the plateau and rolling hills and mountains north of Oneida Lake and beyond, which they maintained as hunting and fishing territory; the fertile, level plain of the upper Mohawk River Valley, where most of their settlements were situated; and the hilly terrain of the Susquehanna...