Haudenosaunee Genealogies: Conflict and Community in the Oneida Land Claim

Returning Home, Part 1

"Where are you from?" asks J., a New York Oneida.

"Green Bay, Wisconsin," I say. "Oneida."

"Wis-SCAHN-sin," he says, imitating me.

I smile but also roll my eyes, since I like to think that I don't have an accent, contrary to what others might hear.

"What brings you here?" he asks.

"I'm working at a job now and planning on going to school in Buffalo next fall. I want to keep living here in this area, though."

"Oh, you're returning home, huh?"

I'm confused until I realize he means returning "home" to central upstate New York in the Oneida land claim area. My smile grows uncertain as I try to figure out if he's being sarcastic or genuine. I actually don't consider myself returning, though I know other Wisconsin Oneidas who do, nor do I consider this home yet, so I stay silent.

"Who's your family?" he continues.

I feel steadier now, more sure of myself. I'm familiar with this line of questioning. Native people always seem interested in this question, for it speaks to the larger issue of connection with one another. The two of us turn away from questions of "home" and move toward the more stable ground of kinship and whom we know.

It turns out that he is distantly related to the Skenandores, to whom I'm related by marriage. So he says that we are related too.

This conversation took place shortly after I moved to Syracuse, New York, over a decade ago to work for the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin's Land Claim Commission. During my time working for the Land Claim Commission I was challenged several times by other Native people with questions of connection and the rightful "place" of the Wisconsin Oneidas, always seeming to come back to this idea of "returning home." Were the Wisconsin Oneidas returning to the homeland after being removed to Wisconsin, or did we leave voluntarily (migrate), and therefore was our "home" now properly understood to be located in Wisconsin? It was not always easy to answer such questions, and I found myself increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the definitions of home as well as a discourse of place that did not seem to take into account varying degrees of mobility and temporality as well as multiple community definitions. I wanted to reject language and terms that seem to have been assigned to the Oneidas by outsiders (though certainly adopted and used by Oneidas, as will be illustrated in this article) and remake the categories to more fully convey the experiences, sense of place, and ways of knowing of the Oneida communities. This article offers some initial thoughts toward this aim.

The differences between homeland and hostland and migration versus removal (or diaspora) have been extensively studied.¹ Each term is weighted with political meaning. One definition of diaspora is the forceful dispersal of a people from its homeland, which is how some characterize the experiences of the Wisconsin and Thames Oneida from the Oneida ancestral lands in New York.² Though it is often used more to describe groups recently dislocated from their homes, such as refugees forced to flee because of war, some locate their diaspora in a more distant past. Time has not lessened a connection with their homeland but has instead sharpened the feelings of justice denied. James Clifford has identified the ways in which groups of oppressed people may redefine themselves at a later time as diasporic communities, seeing within this definition the possibilities of empowerment and agency that are perhaps not addressed in a "minority" claim to the "majority" in the hostland.³

The Oneidas have a history marked by land dispossession and removal from a once vast homeland. Eighteenth-century treaties recognized Oneida territory as a large swath of land that ran through what is now central New York, a territory of some five million acres. Because a particularly desired transportation route known as the Oneida Carrying Place was in this territory, non-Natives began to settle there immediately...