The Wisconsin Oneidas and the Episcopal Church

A Chain Linking Two Traditions

L. Gordon McLesterIII,Laurence M. Hauptman,Kenneth Hoyan House

• Verlag: Indiana University Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253041418
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

This unique collaboration by academic historians, Oneida elders, and Episcopal clergy tells the fascinating story of how the oldest Protestant mission and house of worship in the upper Midwest took root in the Oneida community. Personal bonds that developed between the Episcopal clergy and the Wisconsin Oneidas proved more important than theology in allowing the community to accept the Christian message brought by outsiders. Episcopal bishops and missionaries in Wisconsin were at times defenders of the Oneidas against outside whites attempting to get at their lands and resources. At other times, these clergy initiated projects that the Oneidas saw as beneficial—a school, a hospital, or a lace-making program for Oneida women that provided a source of income and national recognition for their artistry. The clergy incorporated the Episcopal faith into an Iroquoian cultural and religious framework—the Condolence Council ritual—that had a longstanding history among the Six Nations. In turn, the Oneidas modified the very form of the Episcopal faith by using their own language in the Gloria in Excelsis and the Te Deum as well as by employing Oneida in their singing of Christian hymns.

Christianity continues to have real meaning for many American Indians. The Wisconsin Oneidas and the Episcopal Church testifies to the power and legacy of that relationship.

PART I

CHRISTIANITY COMES TO ONEIDA COUNTRY

Editors’ Introduction to Part I

In the first essay in Part I, Laurence M. Hauptman describes the Oneida world in central New York before the arrival of Christian missionaries. He defines the Oneidas’ historic territory, outlines their role within the Iroquois League of the Five Nations, and briefly recounts some of their beliefs, including ones that corresponded to Christianity. He also stresses the Iroquoian importance of alliance—namely, the way the Five and later Six Nations brought outsiders, Indian as well as non-Indian, into their orbit through the mechanism of the Covenant Chain.

Karim M. Tiro then traces the early history of Oneida Christianity. The initial contact came in 1667, when Jesuit Jacques Bruyas arrived at the Oneida village of Kanonwalohale and established the St. Francis Xavier mission. Because he did not speak their native language, the Catholic missionary was successful only with the Oneida war captives who had an understanding of English and had previously been exposed to Christianity. Bruyas was followed by Jesuit Pierre Millet, who made inroads within the community until his presence was withdrawn in the mid-1680s because of severe tensions building between the Five Nations and the French. In 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was established by the British monarchy, and it soon began organizing Anglican efforts to convert the Iroquois. In 1709, missionary Thomas Barclay was sent from England to Albany to establish a mission. He was followed by William Andrews, who moved the mission to Mohawk Country near the English outpost of Fort Hunter. Five years later, Andrews extended his proselytizing westward to the Oneida village of Oriske. Other Anglican missionaries followed Andrews, including Thomas Barclay Jr. and John Ogilvie, but they failed to convert a significant number of Oneidas; however, the Anglican missionary presence and Christianity were not completely lost on the Oneidas. Tiro describes how the missionaries’ preaching actually led to the comingling of Christian and Iroquoian beliefs, with Christ as the Iroquoian Peacemaker, the Virgin Mary as Sky Woman, and angels as traditional spirit forces.

The Oneidas were exposed to the religious fervor of the Great Awakening from the 1740s until the American Revolution by Congregational ministers such as Gideon Hawley and Eleazar Wheelock, and, more importantly, by Samuel Kirkland, a Presbyterian missionary. Kirkland arrived at a time when the Oneida world was rapidly changing and facing multiple crises—battlefield losses in colonial wars, white encroachment, intratribal schisms, epidemics, and alcohol. Although the missionary served the key role of intermediary between the white and Indian worlds, his version of Christianity characterized the Indians as being cursed and facing a fiery hell. He was tolerated by some Oneidas, such as chiefs Skenandoah and Agwaelendongwas (Chief Good Peter), the latter who served as his assistant. However, in the quarter century before his death in 1808, Kirkland began to broker deals with land companies and to secure compensation at the expense of the Oneidas, and he became more interested in promoting his plans for Hamilton-Oneida Academy, now Hamilton College. The result was that the majority of Oneidas repudiated him even before his death in 1808.

Both the Anglican Church, by then referring to itself in the United States as the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Oneidas had to rebuild after the American Revolution, a seminal event in both of their histories. Because many of the Anglican clerics in New York were Loyalists during the Revolution and refused to take oaths to the American Congress, they found themselves in disfavor during the war and in the years that immediately followed. Church leaders faced a crisis, forcing them to adapt and lead the church in new directions. At the same time, the Oneidas were in crisis as well, with most allying themselves with the American cause, unlike most within the nations of the Iroquois League, who served the British. The Oneidas, too, had to set out in a new direction and find new ways to cope with aggressive land speculators allied with Albany politicians who were knocking at their door after the Revolution. Indeed, from 1785 onward, the Oneidas were dispossessed of 99 percent of their central New York landholdings—millions of acres—in so-called state treaties.

Dissatisfied with Kirkland’s complicity in tribal land losses, the Oneidas turned back to their Anglican religious roots after the missionary’s death. Once again, the Oneidas needed intermediaries and allies because their world in central New York was coming apart. The millions of acres of Oneida lands were the necessary ingredient for the rise of the Empire State, since they were situated at a vital transportation crossroads that was essential for New York’s economic growth after the Revolution. In order for New York State to expand east-west and north-south, private entrepreneurial interests in conjunction with Albany officials—be they Federalists, Jeffersonians, Clintonians, Democrats, or Whigs—and subsidized by public funds constantly picked away at Oneida lands from 1785 until the mid-1840s. By 1817, New York State began building the Erie Canal, which went right through Oneida lands. Now even more Oneidas believed that their fate was sealed. Already severely fractionated in their polity and religion, the Oneidas largely found it impossible to resist the pressures of land speculators and state and federal officials, leading a majority of the community to eventually migrate for its protection and survival west to Michigan Territory in the period 1822 to 1838, or to Ontario from 1839 to 1846.

In the last selection in Part I, Michael Oberg focuses on the controversial Mohawk Eleazer Williams and his role in bringing the Episcopal faith to the Oneidas. By the time Williams arrived in Oneida Country, some within the Indian leadership were already talking about moving out of central New York. Bishop John Henry Hobart encouraged the idea and saw the possibilities of extending the church’s influence onto the frontier well beyond New York State. In 1816, Hobart, intent on extending the influence of the church, placed Williams as lay catechist at the newly established Oneida mission in New York. In Bishop Hobart’s opinion, Williams, a descendant of the famous unredeemed captive Eunice Williams taken by the Mohawks in their 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, was the perfect person to bring the faith to the Oneidas, since he had lived and been educated in both the Indian and white worlds; he was also familiar with both the Catholic and Anglican religious traditions and was a charismatic and fluent Native-language speaker. Despite his bizarre claim that he was the “lost dauphin” of the royal family of France, the Mohawk was a skillful preacher and soon succeeded in converting significant numbers of the Oneida “Pagan Party,” later known as the Second Christian Party, to the Episcopal religion.

Williams was a schemer, an opportunist with little moral fiber, who worked for a decade and a half for the Ogden Land Company, which was intent on securing Oneida lands by “encouraging” Indian migration to Michigan Territory. Although he did not originate the idea of moving the Oneidas to the West, Williams conspired with agents of the Ogden Land Company to promote this plan. From 1820 onward, the Oneidas sent exploring parties to the West and ultimately decided to settle in Wisconsin, then the western part of Michigan Territory. After negotiating with the Menominees and Ho Chunks in 1821 and 1822, the Oneidas, along with the Stockbridge and Brothertown, were allowed to reside there. After the settlement of the Oneidas on their Duck Creek reservation and Hobart’s elevation of Williams to deacon in 1824, the controversial Mohawk cleric, now married to a thirteen-year-old Menominee girl, turned his attention to other things, focusing on nonspiritual matters—namely, the acquisition of lands in the environs of Appleton. Many Oneidas broke with Eleazer Williams soon after their arrival in the West, and they later formally repudiated him in council, declaring him persona non grata in the early 1830s. The chain, now tarnished by Williams’s actions and strange behavior, required polishing once again.

In need of allies to fend off Jacksonian Indian policies that threatened their removal from Wisconsin to Kansas, then part of Indian Territory, the Oneidas faced another crisis. Luckily for both the church and the Oneidas, Episcopal bishop Jackson Kemper, a compassionate and extraordinary churchman, arrived in Michigan Territory in 1834 and restored the damaged chain. The bishop became the Oneidas’ greatest defender for the next four decades. Largely because of Kemper’s influence, the majority of Wisconsin Oneidas remained within and allied to the Episcopal Church despite the 1834 arrival of a significant number of Oneida Methodists from New York led by Chief Jacob Cornelius.

1

THE ONEIDA WORLD BEFORE CHRISTIANITY

Laurence M. Hauptman

THE ONEIDAS ARE ONE OF THE FIVE ORIGINAL nations of the Iroquois League or Confederacy, holding nine out of fifty sachemships within it. A sixth nation, the Tuscaroras, was incorporated into the League between 1711 and 1724. To the east of the Oneidas, the Mohawk Nation held sway, and to the west was the homeland of the Onondaga Nation, the central fire of the Iroquois League.¹ According to one estimate of the Oneidas before the smallpox epidemic of 1634, their population was between 1,500 and 1,800 individuals.²

The Oneidas’ original homeland in today’s central New York included approximately 5 to 6 million acres of land at the time of European contact. It stretched from the Saint Lawrence River valley to just beyond what is today the New York–Pennsylvania boundary line. At the heart of their estate was the short portage between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek, known as the Oneida Carrying Place, which was strategic for both the Hodinöhsö:ni´ and, later, for Euro-Americans. To the southeast are the headwaters of the Mohawk, which flows eastward until it joins the Hudson, which connects the Atlantic Ocean at New York City. On the north was Wood Creek, which, along with Fish Creek, Oneida Lake, and the Oswego River, was a major passageway to Lake Ontario and the rest of the Great Lakes. From Wood Creek, Oneida lands ran southeast along the Unadilla River to the Susquehanna and then to the second branch of the Delaware River. To the north, where great timber and wildlife resources abounded in the western Adirondacks, the Oneida homeland stretched from East Canada Creek to West Canada Creek near today’s Poland, New York, and then west across the headwaters of the Black and Oswegatchie Rivers and northwest to the Saint Lawrence River following the shoreline of Lake Ontario southward to nearly the rift of the Onondaga River valley. It ran due south to a point five miles west of the outlet of Oneida Lake, one of the great fisheries of eastern North America, and then southeast to Chittenango Falls on Chittenango Creek and Cazenovia Lake. This territory then returned to its starting point via the headwaters of the Oswego River and the course of the Susquehanna.³

One of the central beliefs of Oneida existence, then and now, concerns a standing stone, an inanimate boulder unlike any other stone. The elders in central New York told the children stories about this magical stone and other Hodinöhsö:ni´ legends when storytelling was at a premium during the harsh winter months. It was supposed to bring good luck when Oneidas took the warpath. Unaided by human hands, it would suddenly appear every time the Oneidas would move their villages in their homeland. The Oneidas conducted their great councils around this sacred stone, where they resolved questions presented to them and worshipped the Creator.⁴ Finally, when the village at Oneida Castle was founded, the stone remained there. Consequently, it is no coincidence that the Oneidas call themselves “Onyota´a:ká: the people of the standing stone.”⁵

In the seventeenth century, the Oneida world was a matrilineal, matrilocal society organized into three clans—Wolf, Bear, and Turtle. Each clan was headed by a matron, and each clan appointed three chiefs. Clan mothers had control of chiefly titles. In the seventeenth century, the forest world was the province of men, and they handled diplomacy, the hunt, and war; however, in the clearing (or village), women had key roles in nominating male leadership, in horticulture, in child-rearing, and within the walls of the longhouse residence.⁶ Longhouses were located within the Iroquois’ palisaded villages and were directly associated with maternal lineages, since matrons owned the longhouses. These struct...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Christianity Comes to Oneida Country
• Part II: The Oneida Episcopal Mission: The First Century in Wisconsin
• Part III: Oneida First-Person Accounts of the Episcopal Church and Its Clergy
• Part IV: Reflections on Wisconsin Oneida Episcopal Church Relations
• Contributors
• Appendix A: Timeline
• Appendix B: Episcopal Priests, Vicars, and Deacons Who Have Served the Oneidas in Wisconsin
• Appendix C: Bishops Who Have Headed the Diocese
• Bibliography
• Index