Oneida

Culture

The Oneida are a matrilineal society in which children are born into their mother's clan, deriving their identity, social status, and responsibilities from clan membership. The Oneida have three clans: Turtle, Wolf, and Bear. Traditionally, they spoke the Iroquoian language, grew crops and hunted, lived in longhouses, and, by the 19th century, practiced several religions ranging from Christianity (influenced by Protestant missionary Samuel Kirkland) to the Longhouse religion of Handsome Lake.

American Allies and Treaties

The Oneida Nation's contributions to the colonists in the American Revolution was recognized back then, as it is today in places like the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., where visitors are greeted with the sculpture Allies in War, Partners in Peace, which pays homage to the Oneida.

Following the American Revolution, the U.S. Continental Congress and the Oneida Nation signed the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which guaranteed security in Oneida possession of the traditional homelands they inhabited before the war. These terms were reconfirmed in the 1789 [Page 1643]Treaty of Fort Harmar. Nonetheless, in the years between 1784 and 1789, the state of New York forced the Oneida to relinquish some of their land through the 1785 Treaty of Fort Herkimer and the 1788 Treaty of Fort Schuyler. As a result, the Oneidas lost most of their ancestral homelands, reducing Oneida territory from 6 million acres to about 300,000 acres.

In 1790, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, making it illegal to purchase Indian land without prior federal consent. The 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua with the Iroquois Confederacy was a peace treaty that called for noninterference in the affairs of the six sovereign nations of the Confederacy and provided further protection of their existing territorial boundaries, including that of the Oneida. Despite numerous treaties that were supposed to guarantee and protect Oneida tribal claims to their land, state and local governments imposed 26 additional treaties (later deemed illegal) that further reduced Oneida territory in New York to a few hundred acres.

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