Onyot'aaka

The Onyot'aaka, or People of the Standing Stone, called Oneida by English colonists, are one of the five founding nations of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, with their homeland around Oneida Lake in central New York. A matrilineal people, they were drawn toward the rebel colonists through the missionary Samuel Kirkland, who had worked among them since 1764.

When the American Revolution split the confederacy, most Onyot'aaka backed the revolutionaries: about fifty fought at Oriskany in 1777, and that year Chief Skenandon sent maize to the starving army at Valley Forge, carried by Polly Cooper. Loyalist raiders destroyed their main town in retaliation.

The Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794 granted them six million acres as the first reservation in the United States, but New York later reduced it, driving many to Wisconsin and Canada in the 1820s and 1830s.