The Oneida people are a Native American tribe that was one of the first five nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. The Oneida’s traditional territory is in New York and elsewhere in the Great Lakes region. Similar to the other Iroquois tribes, Oneida societies were strongly matrilineal, with women controlling agricultural properties, descent and inheritance, the election of leaders, and even warfare. For this reason, many heroic or mythological figures were women, both young and elderly.
According to the legend, in the days when the European explorers had not yet arrived, the Oneida’s oldest and most important rivals were the warriors from the Mingo tribe. The Mingos boasted superior numbers, and many times they laid waste to Oneida villages, burning their crops and slaughtering their people. To avoid being continuously massacred, people from the Oneida tribe had to flee deep into the forest, where they lived safely under the protection of the Great Spirit.
Stranded inside caves and small hideouts, the Oneida people were unable to reach their fertile lands where Mingo warriors kept searching for them, and they began to starve. The elders and warrior chiefs of the tribe held a council to find a solution to their miserable condition, at which a brave young woman named Aliquipiso stepped forward to speak. The Great Spirit had sent her a dream, and she had a plan to save her tribe from extinction. In her vision she foresaw her tribesmen hiding atop a sheer cliff, where many heavy boulders and sharp rocks could be thrown down on the unsuspecting Mingos below. She volunteered to risk her life to lead their enemies under the cliff, so the Oneida warriors could crush them with the rocks.
The next day the warrior girl went back to the Oneida abandoned village where the Mingos had set up their new base, pretending to be lost. The rival tribesmen promptly captured her and tied her to a stake to find out where the fleeing Oneidas were hiding themselves. Aliquipiso endured being tortured with fire for long hours to make the deception more believable until she feigned giving up the hiding place. During the night she led the Mingos to the appointed place, where many Oneidas could be spotted safely sleeping as if they were completely unaware of what was going to happen. Speaking in a soft voice, trying not to be heard by her fellow tribesmen, Aliquipiso whispered to the Mingo warriors to gather close to her, so she could lead them all through a secret passage that climbed above the mountain, up to the Oneida safe spot.
As soon as all the Mingos densely amassed around her, becoming an easy target for the Oneida warriors, she started shouting as loud as she could, “Oneida! The enemies are here!” The enormous boulders started raining down, killing many Mingos, but one of their warriors was quick enough to strike her before dying. The surviving Mingos retreated from the forest, left their camp at the abandoned village, and never attacked the Oneida tribe again. To honor her sacrifice, the Great Spirit turned Aliquipiso’s hair into woodbine that the Oneida called “running hair,” and from her body sprang honeysuckle. Both these herbs are good medicines, and the Oneida word for honeysuckle means “blood of brave women.”
Some authors and essayists note how the centrality of the woman figure and the perceived gender equality within the Haudenosaunee culture inspired many women’s rights movements in the nineteenth century. The idea of a strong, free woman who was able to fend for herself with complete sovereignty over her own life constituted the basis for many suffragists to fight for a society in which both genders shared the same rights and responsibilities. Besides the legend of Aliquipiso sacrificing her life to save her tribe, many other myths and stories of the Oneida and Haudenosaunee honored and revered female figures.
Claudio Butticè
See also Fa Mu Lan, or Mulan; Lozen; Niagara Falls’ Maid of the Mist, an Iroquois Legend; Women in Folklore
Further Reading
Elm, Demus, and Harvey Antone. 2000. The Oneida Creation Story. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz, eds. 1984. American Indian Myths and Legends. New York: Pantheon Books.
Hauptman, Laurence M., and L. Gordon McLester, eds. 1999. The Oneida Indian Journey: From New York to Wisconsin, 1784–1860. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Richards, Cara. 1974. The Oneida People. Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series.
Wagner, Sally R. 2003. Sisters in Spirit: Iroquois Influence on Early Feminists. Summertown, TN: Native Voices.