At the Font of the Marvelous: Exploring Oral Narrative and Mythic Imagery of the Iroquois and Their Neighbors

Acknowledgments

xi Acknowledgments i’ve done well by Syracuse University Press and appreciate their professionalism and support throughout this labor. Special thanks to editors Linda Cuckovich, Mary Selden Evans, Christopher Vecsey, and Glenn D. Wright and to manuscript readers, including Jordan Paper. I became interested in the subject matter resulting in this book while I was a historian in the Oneida Indian Nation’s legal department. I will always be grateful to that employer for giving me a job and for the incomparable opportunity to be meaningfully engaged in my work. Chapters 1, 4, and 7 originally were given as talks at the Annual Conference on Iroquois Research at Rensselaerville, N.Y., from 1998 to 2005. To the scholars of that event, past and present, I recognize an immense intellectual debt. Specific thanks are due to Bill Engelbrecht and Mike Foster for clarification on a number of points in Iroquois archaeology and linguistics. Earlier versions of chapters 1 and 7 were published in the journals American Antiquity (Wonderley 2005a), Northeastern Anthropology (Wonderley 2006b), and Ontario Archaeology (Wonderley 2005b). I appreciate the assistance and helpful criticism received from the editors (Michael Jochim, Sean Rafferty, Andrew Stewart) and reviewers of the three articles (those whose names I know are: Tim Abel, Susan Jamieson, Kurt Jordan, Jordan Paper, Michael Spence, and Joan Vastokas). The peer-review process worked for me and made my work better. Thank you. Chapter 7, an archeological look at Iroquois mythic imagery, is a visual topic dependent on quality artifact drawings done by Julia Meyerson (ills. 5, 6c) and Daniel L. Faulkner (all the other illustrations). I created the four maps. xii | Acknowledgments I am grateful to several individuals who made available material crucial to me in a wonderfully timely fashion: Blair Rudes (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), George Hamell (then of the New York State Museum, Albany), and Valerie-Ann Lutz and Mary McDonald (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). And thank you, Patricia Hoffman, for contributing a flattering photograph of the author. ...