The longhouse and the Valley
The Haudenosaunee — "People of the Longhouse," long called the Iroquois Confederacy by outsiders — are an alliance originally of five nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca, joined in the early 1720s by the Tuscarora.1 The Confederacy pictures its territory as a great longhouse stretching across what is now upstate New York. The Mohawk — Kanien'kehá:ka, "People of the Flint" — are traditionally known as its Keepers of the Eastern Door, and the river and valley carry their name.2
The ground under Utica, Rome and Oriskany lies within the homeland of the Oneida — Onyota'a:ká, "People of the Standing Stone" — which stretched across some six million acres of central New York.3 The Great Law of Peace that binds the Confederacy was made long before Europeans arrived — the nations describe its founding as reaching back to time immemorial — and it is kept in oral tradition, so we defer to their telling rather than assigning it a year.4
Trade, war and dispossession
The Valley's geography made it a crossroads: the Mohawk River was the only water-level route through the Appalachians, and the short portage at today's Rome — the Oneida Carrying Place — linked it to Wood Creek, Oneida Lake and the Great Lakes beyond. Control of that route shaped two centuries of trade and warfare, from the fur trade through the French and Indian War to the Revolution.
The Revolution split the Confederacy. The Oneida largely sided with the American cause — the Nation calls its people the United States' first allies — fighting alongside the Tryon County militia at Oriskany in 1777, while most Mohawk fought with the British.5 Whatever side nations chose, the decades around the war brought the same result: New York State land transactions, made both before and after the federal guarantees of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, stripped almost all of the homeland.67
A present tense, not a past one
This is not a story that ended. The Oneida Indian Nation is one of the region's largest employers today, with its homelands centered a short drive west of Rome.8 Mohawk communities continue at Akwesasne and elsewhere.9 When you read the words Mohawk, Oneida, Oriskany, Skenandoa or Sauquoit on a sign, you are reading the Valley's oldest living layer — in languages still spoken here.