Overview

Chief Chapman Scanandoah (1870–1953) was a decorated Navy veteran who served in the Spanish-American War, a skilled mechanic, and a prizewinning agronomist who helped develop the Iroquois Village at the New York State Fair. He was also a historian, linguist, philosopher, and early leader of the Oneida land claims movement. However, his fame among the Oneida people and among many of his Hodinöhsö:ni’ contemporaries today rests with his career as an inventor. In the era of Thomas Edison, Scanandoah challenged the stereotypes of the day that too often portrayed Native Americans as primitive, pre-technological, and removed from modernity. In An Oneida Indian in Foreign Waters, Hauptman draws from Scanandoah’s own letters; his court, legislative, and congressional testimony; military records; and forty years of fieldwork experience to chronicle his remarkable life and understand the vital influence Scanandoah had on the fate of his people. Despite being away from his homeland for much of his life, Scanandoah fought tirelessly in federal courts to prevent the loss of the last remaining Oneida lands in New York State. Without Scanandoah and his extended Hanyoust family, Oneida existence in New York might have been permanently extinguished. Hauptman’s biography not only illuminates the extraordinary life of Scanandoah but also sheds new light on the struggle to maintain tribal identity in the face of an increasingly diminished homeland.

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9780815634898

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Integrating Chapman Scanandoah into the broad history of the Hodinohso: ni, Laurence Hauptman has produced an important, scholarly, and fast-paced book that explores an Oneida patriot s life in protecting the Iroquois as they responded to modernization and American society s hostility to Six Nations aspirations.--Carl Benn author of The Iroquois in the War of 1812

In this book, we have that very rare thing: the biography of a Native American figure who moved through what I have called `the many worlds of the Iroquois.' -Michael Leroy Oberg, author of Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 Widely admired for combining meticulous research with deep sympathy for his subject, Hauptman is the foremost historian of recent Iroquois history. Now he has given us a work illuminating the notable life of Chapman Scanandoah. . . . This book casts new light on neglected chapters of the Oneida land claims story. -Anthony Wonderley, author of Oneida Iroquois Folklore, Myth, and History: New York Oral Narrative from the Notes of H. E. Allen and Others.

Author Information

Laurence M. Hauptman is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History. He is the author of numerous books on the Iroquois, including Seven Generations of Iroquois Leadership: The Six Nations since 1800, which was awarded the Herbert Lehman book prize by the New York Academy of History, and In the Shadow of Kinzua: The Seneca Nation of Indians since World War II, which was awarded the annual book prize by the American Association for State and Local History.

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