Oneida

Of the Six Nations, only the Oneida broke openly with the others to support the American side in the Revolutionary War. Most Haudenosaunee nations either allied with the British Crown or attempted neutrality, but the Oneida, under the influence of the missionary Samuel Kirkland, who had lived among them since 1766 and whom George Washington later credited with an uncommon influence over them, declared support for the colonies and supplied both warriors and intelligence. Oneida fighters served alongside American forces beginning at the Battle of Oriskany in the Mohawk Valley in August 1777, and Oneida women and men are remembered in American accounts for bringing food to Washington's suffering army at Valley Forge that winter.

The choice split the Confederacy's usual unity at the Grand Council and made Oneida territory a target. Loyalist Haudenosaunee forces and their allies burned Oneida towns during the war, and Oneida communities suffered destruction from the same conflict in which they had chosen a side, a cost the historian Barbara Graymont's academic account of the Six Nations in the Revolution documents in detail. The alliance did not spare Oneida land afterward: within a few decades of the war's end, most of the original Oneida territory in New York had been sold or lost under state pressure, the same fate that met nations that had fought against the Americans, and Oneida communities are dispersed today across New York, Wisconsin and Ontario as a result.

On the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, seats are arranged on three benches rather than as five or six separate blocs. Oneida sits with Cayuga as the Younger Brothers, opposite Mohawk and Seneca as the Elder Brothers, with Onondaga's chiefs seated between the two as Firekeepers who host the council and hold its wampum records. William Fenton's political history of the confederacy assigns Oneida nine chief titles among the fifty the original five nations divided among themselves at the confederacy's founding, the same number held by Mohawk despite Oneida's smaller population, a reminder that Grand Council representation was fixed by founding agreement rather than by a population count that could shift over time.

Oneida territory before the Revolutionary War centered on Oneida Lake in what is now central New York, and the nation's name is widely read as referring to a standing or upright stone associated with that homeland. Today Oneida people and their descendants live in three principal communities: the Oneida Indian Nation in New York, the Oneida Nation near Green Bay, Wisconsin, whose ancestors relocated west in the nineteenth century, and Oneida families at Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario alongside every other Haudenosaunee nation. The Longhouse religion, carrying the Great Law of Peace and the Code of Handsome Lake, and Christianity are both practiced among these communities, continuing the same religious diversity that already marked Oneida life in the eighteenth century.