The Oneida Nation of New York

It is ironic, but in many ways fitting, that most 21st century Americans should know the name Oneida not as one of the original peoples of North America but as a name that they vaguely associate with forks. That association is derived from the Oneida Community, a utopian society established at Oneida, New York, in 1848 and dissolved about 1880. Other the links between the two technically stopped at the similarity of their names, a closer examination reveals an odd collection of similarities.

The Oneida Community was a religious and social experiment based on communistic principles and because of this, along with their system of "complex marriage" in which all adults in the community were considered married to one another, they were often viewed with suspicion bordering on hatred by outsiders. This, along with the usual problems that beset utopian communities, brought about the dissolution of the community and the devolution of its associated company from a broad-based manufacturing concern that has gradually narrowed its activities from the manufacture of steel traps and silk and the canning of fruits and vegetables to the manufacture of fine plated and sterling silverware, for which it is now known (Jamison 23).

Certainly, much of what drew the censure of local people around the 19th-century Oneida community was the inhabitants belief in eugenics and Communism. But it was no doubt also based in the fact that the inhabitants of the Oneida Community were very successful, oft

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influence of French Jesuit missionaries, the Iroquois allied themselves with English interests. They bitterly opposed the extension of French settlement southward from Canada, and they were responsible for preventing the English colonies from being flanked on the west by the French. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, the league council declared for neutrality but allowed each of the six component tribes to take sides as it saw fit. Most of them joined the British. After the revolution, the Mohawk, under their leader, Joseph Brant, crossed into Canada; they were followed by the Cayuga, and both tribes were eventually settled on two reservations to the north of Lakes Erie and Ontario. The Tuscarora are scattered, although a number have found a home among the Mohawk; most of the Oneida are settled at Green Bay, Wisconsin, and most of the Seneca in western New York; the Onondaga still hold their valley near Syracuse, New York. Despite their political importance, the confederacy probably never numbered more than 25,000. And despite their currently diminished numbers and their scattering both far from their homelands and far from each other, the confederacy of these six tribes does remain in force and is still in some measure

Category: History - T