Onyota'aka

The Onyota'aka, or Oneida, were one of the five founding Haudenosaunee nations. Their homeland lay around Oneida Lake, between the Mohawk and Onondaga, where they farmed and lived in bark longhouse towns.

Fur wars drew the Oneida into seventeenth-century conflicts. During the American Revolution most sided with the rebels, influenced partly by missionary Samuel Kirkland, among them from 1764; about fifty Oneida fought at Oriskany in 1777. Land cessions followed, and in the 1820s and 1830s many moved to Wisconsin or joined communities in Ontario.