American Indian Culture and Research Journal

RENEWING HAUDENOSAUNEE TIES IN 1925 On 10 October 1925 a ceremony was planned for the scenic fields behind the former tribal school in Oneida, Wisconsin. The event was expected to accomplish a number of goals: it would assert political authority by a group of Oneidas, establish traditional leadership of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy locally, and affirm the Wisconsin Oneida’s ties to the Confederacy to tribal and nontribal members. The local newspaper described the ceremony in terms that stressed both the quaint and exotic qualities of this seemingly anachronistic event. “Chanting the sacred installation ritual originated by Hiawatha and Chief Deganawida more than six hundred years ago, Chief George Van Avery, law giver of the Onondagas Indian nation, will raise to Chiefhood at Oneida tomorrow eighteen Oneida descendants of ancient chiefs at what promises to be one of the greatest and most picturesque Indian ceremonials held in Wisconsin since the days when Indian law was supreme. . . . Elaborate preparations, seeking to make the scene as realistic as possible, have been made.” The newspaper account is one of several about the Oneida in Wisconsin that appeared in the early twentieth century—stories that conveyed a continual sense of surprise at the ways the tribe had managed to remain different from the surrounding non-Native community even while the overall tone confidently reassured its readers that the Oneida were assimilating into American society. Newspapers were particularly interested in Native ceremonies, for they captured the public’s fascination with what was regarded as the foreign customs of a people situated firmly in the past.