Rediscovered native history notebooks donated to Oneida
Due to some anthropological sleuthing on campus, the Oneida Nation near Green Bay, Wis., now holds copies of 167 long-lost notebooks filled with descriptions of Oneida life during the first half of this century.
Wisconsin Oneida Indians wrote all of the notebooks in 1940-41 and 66 are wholly or partly in the Oneida language. That makes the collection possibly the largest body of written work extant in that or any other Iroquoian language. The Oneida were one of the original members of the Iroquois confederacy.
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For historians, anthropologists and linguists, as well as the Oneida Nation, these notebooks are invaluable. Because they were written by the Oneida themselves on so many aspects of their history and culture and involved so many voices, there is no parallel to it in American Indian collections.
Herbert Lewis, |
“For historians, anthropologists and linguists, as well as the Oneida Nation, these notebooks are invaluable,” says Herbert Lewis, professor emeritus of anthropology at UW–Madison and one of the people who found the material.
“Because they were written by the Oneida themselves on so many aspects of their history and culture and involved so many voices, there is no parallel to it in American Indian collections,” he says.
The notebooks represent a major portion of the writing produced by the Oneida Language and Folklore Project. Other writing from the project has long been available to the Oneida Nation and scholars of the Oneida and other Iroquois nations.
Professor Morris Swadesh of UW–Madison originated the Oneida Project in 1938. It was supported by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the New Deal efforts to pull America out of the Great Depression.
Lewis and Professor Emeritus James Stoltman recently found the notebooks in storage at the UW–Madison Department of Anthropology. The originals will go to the State Historical Society, while copies will also be kept at the American Indian Studies resource center on campus and in the Department of Anthropology.
Another set of copies was given to the Oneida Nation at a recent ceremony on the Oneida reservation. Representing the university were Lewis; Provost John Wiley; Casey Nagy, special assistant to the provost; and Roberta Hill, director of the American Indian Studies Program and a member of the Oneida.
Among those representing the Oneida Nation were Chairwoman Deborah Doxtator, Special Counsel Gerald Hill and elders Marie Hinton and Lloyd Schuyler. Schuyler’s father, Oscar Archiquette, was a prominent participant in the Oneida Project. Also attending was Professor Cliff Abbott, a linguist from UW-Green Bay.
“This is like a miracle,” says Roberta Hill. “American Indians have experienced an intergenerational rift in the transference of knowledge, and this return of materials on our life and language will help heal that rift.”
The Oneida Project, which began in January 1939, supported more than a dozen Oneida while they wrote these accounts in their previously unwritten language and then translated them into English. In late 1940 and 1941, many accounts were written directly in English.
At the time, Oneida was in danger of linguistic extinction, due partly to efforts at government-subsidized schools to punish Indian students who spoke their native language. One woman recounted that she had been reprimanded for speaking Oneida in school by having “a rag tied around my mouth all one day.”
The Oneida people who participated in the WPA project produced detailed accounts of Oneida life covering roughly the period 1900-1940. They included autobiographies, recipes (e.g. Iroquois corn soup) and descriptions of farming, hunting, relationships with whites, boarding school education, politics, religion and childbirth. The project also produced an Oneida orthography and hymnal.
The Oneida Project was unique in WPA. Other efforts to record and preserve elements of minority cultures had whites interview Indians or blacks. But the Oneida Project had Oneida people do the interviewing and the writing.
Though Swadesh proposed the project, he left Wisconsin just as it was about to begin. So he enlisted one of his star undergraduates, Floyd Lounsbury of Waukesha, Wis., to carry out the program.
Out of the initial sessions with the Oneida speakers, Lounsbury developed a 19-letter written alphabet. He later went on to a distinguished career as an anthropological linguist at Yale University and died last year before the discovery of the project notebooks.
Lewis believes that the 167 notebooks recently found at UW–Madison were left there when Lounsbury joined the military in 1941 during World War II. Typists apparently transcribed the notebooks at the time, but they have not been found.
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