Thursday, October 4, 2012

A Sense of Place and Pride...

Today I had the opportunity to take a break from my normal work routine to do some family and tribal history exploration at the Oneida Cultural Heritage Department on the Oneida Nation Reservation.  My cousin and I made the road trip to the rez on a fantastic fall day when the color of the trees was glorious.  The weather was great for the drive as well.  My cousin showed me around the old family homesteads.  It was great to see all the locations where my relatives had lived.  As a tribal person, our history is very important to us as is a sense of place and the relevance of those places to our collective stories as families and as tribal Nations.
Oneida Nation Tribal Seal

We met with the tribal historian and some of the other staff to talk about family and to view some amazing documents that are part of the Brothertown Indian Nation collection in the care of the Oneida Nation.  It was nice to sit and listen to the wealth of oral history, both family and tribal, that my cousin and the Oneida tribal historian possess.  The amount of historical information the two of them have committed to memory and can recount at a moments notice is staggering.  I learned some new things today about some historical figures and  families that were really interesting.  The big bonus came when my cousin got in touch with the Holy Apostles Episcopal Church secretary in an attempt to find out some information about my great-great-grandmother who is buried in the cemetery there.  We weren't successful in finding the location of her grave, but did find out that there was a service at the church when she passed.

Brothertown Indian Nation Tribal Seal
We had an opportunity to look at some of the documents and historical texts that are part of the larger Brothertown Collection.  I'm looking forward to seeing the 200+ historic photos of tribal members when they are scanned and indexed.  The absolutely most amazing part of the Collection is the Record Book of the Brothertown Peacemakers Court.  This larger leather bound ledger book goes back to the 1790's, when the first entries were made.  The last recorded entry was made in 1844.  Of course the book is all hand written and contains the stories of many of the members of the tribe.  My great-great-great grandmother's uncle, John Skeesuck, was one of the first Peacemakers for the tribe.  This is truly an amazing piece of tribal judicial history in the United States.


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