Oneida Erotic

The Oneida call themselves Onyota'a:ka, the People of the Standing Stone, after a boulder said to have followed them from village to village and marked wherever they settled. They are one of the five founding nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, and their original country was the stretch of central New York around Oneida Lake and Oneida Creek, between the Mohawk to the east and the Onondaga to the west. In confederacy council they sit with the Cayuga as the younger brothers, a ranking that governs the order of debate rather than prestige. Society runs through the mother's line: the three clans, Wolf, Turtle and Bear, pass from mother to child, and clan mothers hold the power to name chiefs and to remove them.

The Oneida language is Northern Iroquoian and close kin to Mohawk. It is also among the most endangered languages in the confederacy. The remaining fluent first-language speakers are elderly and mostly live in Ontario, while immersion schools and adult classes in Wisconsin and New York work to raise a new generation of speakers.

The defining rupture came in the American Revolution. While most of the confederacy sided with Britain, the Oneida and Tuscarora fought with the colonists, bled at Oriskany in 1777, and carried corn to Washington's starving army at Valley Forge. The reward was slow dispossession. New York State pushed through a series of treaties that stripped nearly all Oneida land in defiance of federal law, and by the 1840s the nation had split three ways: one large body to Wisconsin near Green Bay, another to the Thames River in Ontario, and a remnant holding on in New York on a few dozen acres. Those three communities are today the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin, the Oneida Nation of the Thames and the Oneida Indian Nation of New York, each self-governing under the shared name. A 1985 Supreme Court ruling affirmed the New York Oneida's right to sue over the old treaties, and the casino economy that followed has remade the nation's fortunes around Verona.

Religion is genuinely divided. The Presbyterian missionary Samuel Kirkland converted many Oneida in the 1760s and 1770s, and Methodist and Episcopal congregations traveled with the migrants west and north. Alongside them the Longhouse tradition, shaped by the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, keeps the ceremonial year of Midwinter, Green Corn and the Strawberry festival. At socials and Longhouse gatherings the feathered gustoweh cap still announces nation: an Oneida man's carries two feathers upright and one trailing down. The unrelated Oneida Community, the nineteenth-century utopian commune that became a silverware company, simply borrowed the name from the land.