Today, the Mohawk live in a handful of major communities, several of them in Canada. Many twentieth-century Mohawk worked in steel and construction, particularly on skyscrapers. It was noticed in the early twentieth century that few Iroquois—and no Mohawk—have any fear of heights. Many Mohawk walk a six-inch beam twenty stories up as comfortably as most readers would walk one resting on the ground. One of them explained the national nonchalance: “If you slip, the result is the same if it’s fifty or five thousand feet.” The Mohawk seem to like the challenge of the work—and the danger.
The Oneida
Oneyoteaka is what the People of the Standing Stone (sometimes “People of the Boulder”) used to call themselves, and you can see it Anglicized in the word Oneida. Like the Scots and their Stone of Scone, the Oneida treasured a special boulder that was kept near the main national settlement. Each Oneida village had its own lesser rock by which local ceremonies were held.
The Oneida heartland was the high ground southeast of Oneida Lake, between today’s cities of Utica and Syracuse. Their hunting lands stretched from Pennsylvania to the St. Lawrence River. Possibly the smallest of the Iroquois nations, the Oneida were considered the most arrogant by some missionaries.
Some Oneida historians saw their folk as spin-offs of the Onondaga, their neighbors to the west. Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests closer ties to their eastern neighbors the Mohawk. In one of their own traditions, the Oneida sprouted right out of the ground. Their website proclaims that the People of the Standing Stone have stood on their land for 10,000 years. Who are we to argue? The coming of the Europeans, though, would be disruptive.
While other Iroquois nations sided with the British, the Oneida—with a plucky band of Tuscarora—stuck by the American colonies. The 1777 Battle of Oriskany, New York, was a traumatic moment for the Confederacy, the first time in centuries that Iroquois nations had fought one another.
The Oneida may have saved the Revolution through a delivery of 600 bushels of corn to George Washington that wicked winter at Valley Forge. The Continental Congress praised the Oneida, their love “strong as the oak,” and their fidelity, “unchangeable as truth.” The Congress promised to love, honor, and protect the Oneida “while the sun and moon continue to give light to the world.” Nice words.
The Oneida paid for backing the Americans in the Revolution. Other Iroquois, particularly the Mohawk, attacked Oneida forts and villages. The Oneida lashed back in spades. Many Christian Oneidas took off with a Mohawk preacher to eastern Wisconsin in 1820. Another so-called pagan faction settled on the Thames River near London, Ontario. A third group stayed on the Onondaga Reservation near Syracuse, while a fourth hung on to a few acres outside Sherrill, New York. The state of New York gnawed into Oneida lands throughout the nineteenth century until even their stone was lost. It wasn’t until 1985 that the U.S. Supreme Court would listen to them.
By 1987, the Oneida were down to thirty-two acres of the Onondaga Reservation. The Turning Stone Casino, which opened in 1993, may be turning things around for them. The Oneidas have bought back 3,500 of their former New York acres and have a thriving community today.
Two of the most memorable Oneida may be women. The fearless Polly Cooper stayed with Washington’s troops at Valley Forge to show them how to use and ration the Oneida corn. She may have taken water to soldiers in battle. Our contemporary Joanne Shenandoah is a Grammy-nominated composer, singer, and performer. The Revolutionary-era Oneida chief Hanyerri had many adventures in the service of the United States and seems to have engaged in a lifelong feud with the formidable Mohawk Joseph Brant. The valiant old Oneida chief Hanyost Thaosagwat bears honorable mention. A guide to the 1779 Boyd-Parker mission in the Genesee Valley, Thaosagwat lost his life in the Revolutionary War incident remembered as “the Torture Tree.”
Many world cultures have a central stone that represents the world navel, the center of things. It’s surprising that the other Iroquois nations don’t have an object or place as concentrated as the Oneida stone. Maybe non–Native Americans just haven’t heard about it yet; maybe the other nations don’t need it, with the Oneida holding the crystalline heart for all the rest.
The Tuscarora
The Tuscarora call themselves Skaruren, meaning something like “Gatherers of the Hemp,” or “The Shirt-Wearing People,” possibly because they wore woven hemp shirts. They are the only Iroquois nation whose name for themselves doesn’t come from an earthly feature. Whatever this might say about them, these shirt-wearers were the latest addition to the Confederacy.
The Tuscarora were an Iroquoian-speaking nation whose home was around today’s city of Raleigh, North Carolina. How Iroquoians wound up in North Carolina is lost in prehistory, but Iroquoian language and culture ranged far afield. The Cherokee, an Iroquoian-speaking people we think of as western, hailed from the Carolinas.
By 1700, their homeland was getting hot for the Tuscarora. They were pressured and affronted by the incoming whites. (Tuscarora children may
