Oneida

• For more detail on lifestyles and other events, see my page for the Iroquois .
  
• The Oneida inhabited the inland forests that skirted Lakes Ontario and Erie. They lived in large fortified villages, related to the ancestors of the Iroquois nations. They moved from time to time, and they used fire to clear land for crops and to keep the forests open, a practice that encouraged the growth of brushy browse for deer and other animals.
  
• These people shared a tradition of warfare that centered on taking prisoners and either adopting them into the captor's society or, more often, sacrificing them. Evidence that enemies raided each other's towns regularly appears in distinctive pottery styles found at different sites-the work of captive women who continued to make their highly personalized pottery after being forcibly resettled.
  
• The major Northeastern nations might have destroyed each other in due course, but around the 15th century AD-dates and details differ in tribal traditions-a peacemaker [Deganawidah] came among them, and rival Iroquois tribes formed a political confederation. Leaders thereafter met regularly in a ceremonial longhouse, where they negotiated their differences and agreed upon policies for the near future. So effective was this union that when Europeans came in numbers to North America, they encountered a league of nations that was a viable political force, one they would have to reckon with for generations.
  
• The Oneida spoke Iroquois and was one of the Five Nations referred to as iriakoiw, an Algonquian word that meant "rattlesnakes." To themselves they were the Haudenosaunee-the People of the Longhouse-and they constituted the single most powerful confederation of native North Americans in recorded history. They resided between the Mohawk and the Onondaga, south of the St Lawrence River.
  
• The Iroquois conceived of their league as a great longhouse stretching from the Mohawk Valley almost to the Pennsylvania border in the west. In it the five tribes gathered around five fires. The Mohawk guarded the eastern side; to their west were the Oneida, then the Onondaga, who tended the central hearth; following them were the Cayuga and then the powerful Seneca, keepers of the western door. The Iroquois Trail, spanning the length of what is now upstate New York, provided moccasined runners with easy access to any part of the longhouse.
  
• From the Iroquois Thanksgiving ritual---Now we will speak again about him, Our Creator. He decided, "Above the world I have created...I will continue to look intently and to listen intently to the earth, when people direct their voices at me." Let there be gratitude day and night for the happiness he has given us. He loves us, he who in the sky dwells. He gave us the means to set right that which divides us.
  
• Like a domestic longhouse, the league cound be extended to shelter other peoples. In 1722, Tuscarora refugees from war with the English migrated north from the Carolinas and were soon accepted as a Sixth Nation. During the course of the 18th century other refugees filtered into Iroquois country, and several new communities of displaced peoples grew up under the protective Tree of Peace.
  
• During the Christianity movement, the powerful emotions Christianity sparked, converts often face terrible sacrifices. Communities divided between Christians and traditionalists-or between adherents of different Christian denominations. Mohawks who espoused Catholicism moved away to form new enclaves at French mission villages like Caughnawaga and St. Regis on the St Lawrence River. Most of their relatives who stayed at Ft Hunter and Canajoharie, on the Mohawk River, became Protestant. Oneidas in 1772 complained that "we are despised by our brethren, on account of our Christian profession." Some people tried to resolved the conflicts between native tradition and Christian belief by following both at once-going to Mass on Sunday, and honoring the Great Manitou on Monday. There was room for more than one divinity in Iroquoian religion, after all, and a convert could read the Bible and still believe in the magic of dreams. Still, the Christian path to salvation often proved a hard road in Indian country.
  
• The Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 sent  British and American agents hurrying into Indian country to recruit warriors for their respective sides. But most Indian people tried to remain neutral. Caughnawaga and Abenaki on the St Lawrence kept both sides at arm's length, knowing they had little to gain and much to lose if they got involved. The Iroquois also attempted to remain on the sidelines - at first.
  
• Slowly, however, the Iroquois were pulled into the ocnflict, and the resulting split in loyalty crippled the league as an effective force. The Oneida and Tuscarora generally supported the Americans; the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Seneca sided with England.
  
• A contingent of Senecas also fought for the British at Oriskany; ranged against them on the American side were companies of Oneida and Tuscarora warriors. Earlier that year, in the wake of a smallpox epidemic that killed three Onondaga chiefs, the council fire of the Iroquois League had been ritually extinguished. Now, in the smoke of battle, the great Longhouse Confederacy was truly ended. Brother fought against brother in bitter hand-to-hand conflict, leaving the ground heaped with bodies and tinting the streams red with blood, in an engagement long remembered with horror by those who survived it.
  
• In New England upaid Revolutionary War soldiers were given Indian lands instead of currency...Indians from Stockbridge returned from battle to find that their neighbors had seized control of both their town government and their real estate. The Stockbridge Indians left home and moved west, taking up residence near the Oneida in upstate New York.
  
• The Revolution left the Iroquois  Confederacy in ruins. On a small stretch of land set aside for them by the British government-and where their descendants still inhabit the Six Nations Reserve-they built new homes and churches and rekindled their sadly diminished council fire.
  
• The government of the Iroquois was now permanently divided between Joseph Brant's followers in Canada and groups remaining in New York. To mark the split, tribal leaders physically cut the great founding wampum belt of the confederacy into two separate parts. The New York chiefs then began negotiating their own peace agreements with the Americans.
  
• They met at Ft Stanwix in 1784, and under the circumstances they probably did the best they could. The Americans, as victors, held most of the high cards. Maintaining that Washington's troops had "conquered" the Iroquois, the American treaty commissioners demanded huge land concessions as the price of peace. The terms were an exercise in humiliation. All Iroquois-held territory in Pennsylvania and Ohio and much of the western New York heartland-the same areas that soldiers in the Sullivan expedition had praised for their rich, productive soil-had to be signed away. The domains for the Seneca, the Cayuga, and the Onondaga shrank to a tiny poriton. Even the Oneida and Tuscarora, who as wartime allies had expected to remain whole, lost out. Later agreements with private land companies and the state of New York cost the Oneida so much acreage that most of them pulled up stakes and moved to either Wisconsin or Ontario.

Onondaga

• As with the Oneida, see Iroquois for many more details on lifestyles and other events.
  
• The Onondaga inhabited the inland forests that skirted Lakes Ontario and Erie. They lived in large fortified villages, related to the ancestors of the Iroquois nations. They moved from time to time, and they used fire to clear land for crops and to keep the forests open, a practice that encouraged the growth of brushy browse for deer and other animals.
  
• These people shared a tradition of warfare that centered on taking prisoners and either adopting them into the captor's society or, more often, sacrificing them. Evidence that enemies raided each other's towns regularly appears in distinctive pottery styles found at different sites-the work of captive women who continued to make their highly personalized pottery after being forcibly resettled.
  
• The major Northeastern nations might have destroyed each other in due course, but around the 15th century AD-dates and details differ in tribal traditions-a peacemaker [Deganawidah] came among them, and rival Iroquois tribes formed a political confederation. Leaders thereafter met regularly in a ceremonial longhouse, where they negotiated their differences and agreed upon policies for the near future. So effective was this union that when Europeans came in numbers to North America, they encountered a league of nations that was a viable political force, one they would have to reckon with for generations.
  
• The Onondaga spoke Iroquois and was one of the Five Nations referred to as iriakoiw, an Algonquian word that meant "rattlesnakes." To themselves they were the Haudenosaunee-the People of the Longhouse-and they constituted the single most powerful confederation of native North Americans in recorded history. They resided southwest of the Oneida and northeast of the Cayuga, south of the St Lawrence River but north of the Mohawk River.
  
• The Iroquois conceived of their league as a great longhouse stretching from the Mohawk Valley almost to the Pennsylvania border in the west. In it the five tribes gathered around five fires. The Mohawk guarded the eastern side; to their west were the Oneida, then the Onondaga, who tended the central hearth; following them were the Cayuga and then the powerful Seneca, keepers of the western door. The Iroquois Trail, spanning the length of what is now upstate New York, provided moccasined runners with easy access to any part of the longhouse.
  
• The Five Nations would meet periodically on a hilltop at Onondaga. Honored regalia of the Iroquois League included a notched maplewood staff with pegs and pictographs representing the ancestral titles of the league's 50 chiefs. Allocated by tribe and clan, the titles were read during the Roll Call of the Chiefs that took place at major ceremonial meetings. Reflecting their status as keeper of the league's wampum records, the Onondaga had 15 chieftainships, more than any other tribe.
  
• During the Christian movement, adding to the spiritual turmoil, rival Christian sects waged a heated competition for Indian converts, particularly in the border areas between colonies. French Catholics and English Protestants both attempted to proselytize in Iroquois territory-to the growing dismay of the intended proselytes. "You both tell us to be Christians," the Onondaga headman Dekanissore lashed out at officials of New York and Canada in 1701; "you both make us mad; we know not what side to choose." At length the pragmatic Dekanissore advised his peope to pray with the side that offered them the best deals in trade.
  
• While most colonial administrators did their honest best to educate and "civilize" their Indian neighbors-hoping perhaps to tame their highy independent ways-the Indians themselves remained doubtful. In 1744, when the Virginia legislature offered free tuition at the College of William and Mary to six Iroquois youths, the Iroquois politely declined. Explaining their reasons, the great Onondaga spokesman Canasatego told why a college education made no sense at all:
  
  "We have had some experience of it. Several of our young people were formerly brought up in the colleges of the Northern provinces; they were instructed in all your sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, unable to bear either cold or hunger, knew neither how to build a cabin, take a deer, nor kill an enemy, spoke our language imperfectly, were therefore neither fit for hunters, warriors, nor counselors; they were totally good for nothing.
  
  "We are however not the less obliged for your kind offer, though we decline accepting it; and to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we will take great care of their education, and instruct them in all we know, and make men of them."

Osage

• "The favor of the Great Spirit rested on the abundant forest, flowers, songbirds, and small animals of these quiet hills. Then a fierce dragon devastated the land, bringing disease and hunger on the people. The Indian Nations pleaded with the Great Spirit to subdue the dragon, and the might of all the heavenly forces contrived to bury it deep under the mountain, where it shakes the earth even today. Once the Great Spirit had reclaimed his beautiful resting spot, he caused pure water to gush from the earth, and asked that his favorite place be held neutral ground, so all can share in the healing waters."-Caddo legend
  
  Since that distant, unknown time thousands of years ago when the first Indians discovered the steaming waters of Arkansas's hot springs, its fame has spread far and wide. Evidence from stone artifacts shows that ancient peoples lived in the region, quarried stone from along the mountain ridges, and looked to the thermal waters and healing mud baths to restore health to the infirm. In historic times tribes as distant and various as the Crow, Blackfeet, Comanche, Quapaw, Sioux, Osage, and Choctaw gathered together to hunt, trade, and take the healing waters. Even when their peoples were at war, individuals of opposing tribes could come together here in safety and peace.
  
  The creative energies of nature are clearly at work here. As rain falls on the mountains and sinks down into the warm rock, minerals dissolve while the underground heat sterilizes and filters out impurities in the liquid. The water seeps slowly through the porous sandstone on the lower west side of Hot Springs Mountain until it flows out through cracks in the rock at a rate of about 850,000 gallons a day-the end of an eventful 4,000 year journey through the mountain. Thus the Great Spirit provides voluminous streams of sacred medicine water to all his tribes.
  
• The Osage inhabited most of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. They were between the Iowa and Caddo. They were considered part of the Plains tribes, and were the most eastern tribe reaching to the Mississippi River.
  
• The Osage were active when it came to stealing horses. Here are some excerpts from Anthony Glass of Natchez, MS, who in July 1808 set out from Natchitoches, TX for Taovaya-Wichita trading villags on the Red River.
  
  August 11th: I then waited on the Great Chief and was received with every token of Friendship I informed him I would wait on him again the next day and informed him for what purpose we had come to his country and returned to my tent we found our Camp filled with a quantity of green Corn, Beans, Water and Mus Melons.
  
  August 12: I exhibited here some goods which I told them I had to exchange for horses several came and offered horses but were not satisifed with the offers made for them. A Chief man came up, and ordered the Indians all away; him and the principal chief spoke together some time and concluded that the fault was in my interpreter and that it was him who made the difficulty; but they were mistaken. they demanded more for their horses than I could afford to give them two men went with me to my camp and were beginning to trade but before it was concluded the man who first made the diffculty came and ordered them all away.
  
  The man I was endeavouring to trade with yesterday came over this morning and took the same for his horses I had offered him the day before. Several principal men came over and I bought about twenty horses without difficulty.
  
  August 23rd: The Men who were out guarding the Horses came in this morning and reported that a party of Osages had stolen twenty nine of them, and the best we had.
  
  Sept 6th: Met the Chiefs of the west side of the River in Council. some of the Company was displeased at the offer I had made him for his horse and said he would go and Inform the Spaniards that we were here-a Woman replied you may inform them but if they come here to interrupt our trading with these Americans I myself will kill their Captain-the other then said if that is your talk I don't go.
  
  Sept 28th: A Party of Osages made their appearance on Horseback advancing directly to the village as though it was their intention to enter it, but it was soon discovered that their only object was to get between the Village and some of the Panie Horses so as to cut them off, which they effected and drove off a number. the Panis sallied out upon them and killed one of them and the Osages wounded a Pani so that he died the next day....We were persuaded it was the same Party who stole our Horses on the 22nd of August-one of them was riding a remarkable Paint Horse that used to be my own riding Horse, which was stolen with those on the 22d of August-The Osage Indian that was killed was cut in pieces and distributed through the different Villages and all the men women and children danced for three days.
  
• When Oklahoma finally became a state in 1907, Indians throughout the area were soon swamped by a massive new influx of boomers.  Native communities survived, but their reservations were not preserved and the tribal land base disappeared almost completely.
  
  An exception was the case of the Osage tribe, which in 1870 had arranged with the government to sell its reservation in Kansas and relocate to the eastern part of the Cherokee Outlet, adjacent to the Cherokee Nation proper. In 1896, as the Dawes Commission's negotiations with various tribes were inching forward, oil was discovered on the Osage reservation-suddenly raising the stakes to an entirely new level. Talks slowed to a halt and remained deadlocked until an ingenious plan propsed by the Osage was accepted by Congress in 1906; the reservation's surface area would be allotted much as it was on other reservations, but mineral rights would continue to be owned communally, with proceeds to be shared by the 2,229 tribal members officially enrolled as of January 1907. Their foresight and shrewdness were well rewarded. The explosive demand for oil and natural gas in the 1920's produced so much money that until the Great Depression set in, the Osage were the wealthiest nation per capita in the world.
  
• The Japanese air attack that surprised Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, brought a swift response from the US government; Congress delcared war the next day. But some of the nation's citizens-Native Americans, as it happened-reacted even more quickly. In a rural area of northeastern Oklahoma, just hours after the radio reports about Pearl Harbor, war drums summoned members of the Osage tribe to repel the enemy. During the months and years that followed, the Osage saw many of the young people off to war and sought other ways to contribute to the defense effort.
  
  Chief Fred Lookout presided over ceremonies at which warriors' names were bestowed on the tribe's men (and in departure from tradition, women) who entered the armed forces. By April 1943 there were 381 Osage in uniform, the most prominent among whom was Clarence L Tinker. Before his combat death in 1942, Tinker had been made a major general in the Army Air Corps-the first Native American to achieve a general's rank since the Civil War, when Ely Parker, a Seneca, served as one of Ulysses S Grant's closest aides and Stand Watie, a Cherokee, was the last confederate general to surrender.
  
  More than 200 Osage were employed in airplane factories located in Tulsa, the city nearest Osage County, where most of the tribespeople lived. Those who remained at home collected scrap metal, rolled bandages, and staged victory dances celebrating the exploits of tribal combatants. Using some of their remaining oil wealth from the 1920's, the Osage bought war bonds in quantity and added a distinctive flair to their defense effort by negotiating the purchase of a training airplane for the Army Air Corps.